The next AI advantage is not speed, it's taste. I'm seeing this firsthand in my business right now. Everyone is getting faster. Faster emails. Faster decks. Faster code, faster content. But faster average is still average.
The edge is knowing what looks good. Knowing what to keep, what to cut, and what actually feels true. AI gives you output. Taste creates the value. That is the whole thesis, and the rest of this is me explaining why I believe the market is about to start paying for it.
Speed was the first dividend of AI, and it was real. For two years, the pitch behind almost every AI tool was the same promise: the thing that used to take you a day now takes you twenty minutes. The email writes itself. The deck assembles itself. The code drafts itself. The first people who picked these tools up got a genuine head start, because for a window of time they were fast and everyone around them was not.
Why is speed no longer an advantage with AI?
An advantage only holds while it is scarce, and AI has made speed universal. When every professional can produce drafts, decks, code, and content at the same accelerated pace with the same tools, fast production becomes the entry fee rather than the edge. The differentiator moves to judgment about which output is actually good.
That window is closing, because the speed went universal. OpenAI published a piece on its own site titled Codex is becoming a productivity tool for everyone, reporting that its coding agent passed 5 million weekly active users, up more than six times since its desktop app launched in February, with knowledge workers now about 20 percent of its users and growing. Everyone can now build. This is the other side of that same coin. When everyone can build, and everyone can draft, and everyone can produce, doing those things quickly stops being an advantage. It becomes the entry fee.
An advantage only works while it is scarce. Speed was scarce in 2024. It is not scarce in 2026. The professional who produces in twenty minutes what used to take a day is no longer remarkable, because the person at the next desk does it too, with the same tools, at the same speed, often from the same prompts. When a capability is evenly distributed, it cancels itself out of the competition. What remains is whatever the tools do not distribute evenly.
Is AI making work more productive or more average?
Both, and that is the problem. According to Microsoft's Work Trend Index research, the average worker now receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages a day and is interrupted every two minutes, and Microsoft's researchers concluded that activity is not the same as progress. AI accelerates output volume, but without judgment applied to that output, faster average work is still average.
Look at what all that speed is actually producing. Microsoft's researchers studied the modern workday in their Work Trend Index report on what they call the infinite workday, and the numbers describe a flood. The average worker now receives 117 emails and 153 chat messages a day and gets interrupted every two minutes, roughly 275 times a day. Edits to PowerPoint decks spike 122 percent in the final ten minutes before a meeting. And Microsoft's own conclusion from inside that data is the part I keep thinking about: activity and progress are not the same thing. Faster tools pointed at a broken process produce broken output faster.
Now read those numbers from the other side of the desk. Every person you send work to is living inside that flood. Your client, your boss, your buyer, your investor. They are wading through more fast, fluent, competent-looking output than any human has ever had to process. The fast and fluent part no longer registers with them. It is wallpaper. The thing that stops their scroll, the thing they remember, the thing they forward, is the rare piece that feels true. That is not a speed problem. That is a taste problem.
What does taste mean in the AI era?
Taste is the judgment to know what looks good, what to keep, what to cut, and what actually feels true, before anyone else reacts to it. As AI makes fast output universal, taste becomes the differentiating skill because it determines which of the many fast drafts is actually worth shipping. It is built through repetition and honest comparison, not downloaded with a tool.
So let me define taste, because the word sounds soft and the skill is not. Taste is not aesthetics and it is not pretension. Taste is knowing what looks good before anyone reacts to it. Knowing which of the five versions is the one. Knowing what to keep. Knowing what to cut, which is the hardest part, because cutting means killing something that took effort to make and average work survives on the maker's reluctance to delete. Taste is the accumulated judgment of someone who has seen enough good and bad versions of a thing to feel the difference before they can explain it.
Here is the uncomfortable mechanic underneath all of this. AI raises the floor, not the ceiling. It takes the worst version of everything and makes it competent. But it raises that floor for everyone at the same time, which means the floor is now crowded. The ceiling moved for nobody. The distance between the floor and the ceiling, the gap between competent and exceptional, is now the entire game, and the only thing that crosses that gap is judgment about what is actually good.
I watch this firsthand in my own business. Everyone in my world produces faster than they did a year ago. The marketing, the listings, the client communication, the documents, all of it moves at a pace that would have seemed impossible two years back. And almost none of it stands out, because it all came off the same line at the same speed. The people winning are not the fastest ones. They are the ones who look at ten fast drafts and know, in seconds, which one sounds like a human being who means it, and have the discipline to throw away the other nine.
How do professionals stand out when everyone uses AI?
By developing the judgment to recognize and ship only their best output. AI raises the floor of quality for everyone simultaneously, so competent work is now everywhere. The professionals who stand out are the ones who can tell the difference between fast output and good output, and who have the discipline to cut everything that is merely competent.
The good news is that taste is trainable. It is not downloadable, which is exactly why it holds value, but it is trainable. You build it the way it has always been built: by producing, comparing your output against the best in your field, and studying the gap honestly. By collecting examples of work that made you stop. By asking, every time something lands or fails, what specifically made the difference. AI compresses the producing part of that loop from days to minutes, which means you can run more repetitions of judgment per week than any generation before you. The tool that commoditized speed is also the fastest taste-building machine ever made, for the people who use it that way.
The scarcity moved. That is the cleanest way I can say it. Output used to be scarce and judgment was the cheap part, because slow production meant you only ever judged a handful of options. Now output is infinite and judgment is the bottleneck. Whenever scarcity moves, value moves with it, and the market always figures that out. It is starting to figure it out now.
I have been writing for weeks about reading signals, about how the signal is repeating and AI has crossed over from experiment to infrastructure. Infrastructure means everyone is standing on it. Nobody wins because they have electricity. Once the extraordinary thing becomes the shared ground, the competition moves up a level, to what you build on top of it and whether what you build is any good. That is where we are with AI. The tools are the ground now. Taste is what gets built on top.
So the question worth asking yourself this week is not how much faster you can get. You will get faster anyway; the tools will see to it. The question is whether you can tell the difference between your fast output and your good output, and whether you have the discipline to ship only the second one. The people who can are about to become the most valuable people in every room, and most of them will not be the loudest or the fastest.
The next AI advantage is not speed. Speed is table stakes now, and faster average is still average. The edge is knowing what looks good, what to keep, what to cut, and what actually feels true. AI gives you output. Taste creates the value.
Judd Hoffman is CEO and Co-Founder of Ethica AI, building AI-powered tools for real estate transaction workflows.