Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
- Now that everyone has access to AI, our ability to compete is shifting toward critical thinking, judgment and taste.
- Tasteology is the discipline of making better marketing decisions through critical thinking, accumulated human experience, cultural intelligence, multidisciplinary knowledge and evidence.
- Taste is accumulated experience turned into judgment. But in the age of AI, judgment doesn’t operate alone. I think of it through a framework I call HEJA: Human, Emotional Intelligence, Judgment and AI.
- Before putting anything into the world, ask yourself: Would I invest $10,000 of my own money to make sure more people see this? If not, don’t publish it yet.
When AI became widely available and gave us access to almost all the answers, I started to rethink what it actually means to be a marketer in 2026. Previously, expertise, execution and speed were a competitive edge. Now that everyone has access to them, our ability to compete is shifting toward critical thinking, judgment and taste.
The result is that companies can now create more, faster and at a fraction of the cost. And when everyone uses the same technology to research, optimize and create, sometimes I feel that if we simply switched the logos, we wouldn’t even know which company created the narrative, visual or campaign.
Consumers already feel the consequences. Seventy percent say they tune brands out because of the volume of messages they receive, while 49% of Americans believe generative AI has made the quality of available content worse. When creating more becomes this easy, our responsibility shifts from adding to the volume to making sure what we put into the world is actually worth people’s attention.
By taste, I don’t mean aesthetics or personal preference. I mean judgment: the ability to connect the dots, recognize what is right for a specific brand, what will resonate and be remembered — and what should never make it into the market.
This shift led me to an idea I call Tasteology: the discipline of making better marketing decisions through critical thinking, accumulated human experience, cultural intelligence, multidisciplinary knowledge and evidence.
Tasteology and HEJA
Taste is accumulated experience turned into judgment. But in the age of AI, judgment doesn’t operate alone. I think of it through a framework I call HEJA: Human, Emotional Intelligence, Judgment and AI.
Human is the context no dataset can fully capture. Experience shapes the nuances we notice, the references we draw from and the possibilities we see.
Emotional intelligence is our ability to understand the human being on the other side — something we started to lose in the race for attention. As marketing becomes saturated with fast-created, snackable content, depth becomes more valuable: understanding what people actually feel, value, desire, fear, identify with and want to belong to.
Judgment turns those perspectives into a decision. It questions the obvious answer, distinguishes what is merely possible from what is worth pursuing and chooses what is right for a specific brand, moment and audience.
AI gives us something we’ve never had before: the ability to see the same problem from hundreds of angles, challenge our thinking, test our assumptions and explore possibilities at a scale no individual human mind could reach alone. We are no longer limited by access to information or possibilities. Increasingly, the limits are our curiosity, ambition and imagination.
Together, these form HEJA — the foundation of Tasteology
I saw HEJA come together while building my community for female entrepreneurs in New York. We started with the human reality behind the audience: ambitious women building companies in a city where growth is often celebrated without much conversation about what it takes to sustain it. Instead of another conversation about success, we focused on something many were already thinking about but rarely discussing openly: sustainable growth for highly ambitious women.
Emotional intelligence shaped how we designed those conversations — less like another panel and more like a space where people could recognize themselves in what was being said. Judgment came from bringing academic expertise together with founders who had lived through these challenges themselves, combining evidence with real-world experience. AI helped us research the subject from different angles, challenge our assumptions and then scale the communication around the event.
More than 130 women came, and the event sold out. But what stayed with me was seeing what happens when marketing starts with what people are already feeling, rather than what a brand wants to say.
What this means for entrepreneurs
For entrepreneurs, I believe this requires a much more diversified approach to marketing. Once a week, deliberately study something outside your industry and bring one idea back into a business problem you’re working on — a behavioral principle, an artistic movement, a cultural shift, a technology, a philosophical idea. The point is not to become an expert in everything. It is to train your mind to make connections your category won’t make for you.
And before putting anything into the world, ask yourself one simple question: Would I invest $10,000 of my own money to make sure more people see this? If not, don’t publish it yet.
I think we underestimate the responsibility behind that question. Every entrepreneur eventually becomes a marketer, whether they call themselves one or not. Every product we launch, message we publish, image we put into the world and idea we amplify contributes to the culture people live in.
We are not passive participants in the race for attention. We are shaping what people are being asked to pay attention to. That makes taste a responsibility, not a preference. We are living through one of the most extraordinary periods of human evolution. Let’s take evolution personally — and make what comes next worth remembering.
Key Takeaways
- Now that everyone has access to AI, our ability to compete is shifting toward critical thinking, judgment and taste.
- Tasteology is the discipline of making better marketing decisions through critical thinking, accumulated human experience, cultural intelligence, multidisciplinary knowledge and evidence.
- Taste is accumulated experience turned into judgment. But in the age of AI, judgment doesn’t operate alone. I think of it through a framework I call HEJA: Human, Emotional Intelligence, Judgment and AI.
- Before putting anything into the world, ask yourself: Would I invest $10,000 of my own money to make sure more people see this? If not, don’t publish it yet.
When AI became widely available and gave us access to almost all the answers, I started to rethink what it actually means to be a marketer in 2026. Previously, expertise, execution and speed were a competitive edge. Now that everyone has access to them, our ability to compete is shifting toward critical thinking, judgment and taste.
The result is that companies can now create more, faster and at a fraction of the cost. And when everyone uses the same technology to research, optimize and create, sometimes I feel that if we simply switched the logos, we wouldn’t even know which company created the narrative, visual or campaign.
Consumers already feel the consequences. Seventy percent say they tune brands out because of the volume of messages they receive, while 49% of Americans believe generative AI has made the quality of available content worse. When creating more becomes this easy, our responsibility shifts from adding to the volume to making sure what we put into the world is actually worth people’s attention.
