Every business today has access to roughly the same generative AI tools, the same best-practice playbooks, and the same design and copywriting shortcuts. The result is becoming impossible to ignore: an internet that increasingly looks, sounds, and reads like it was made by the same hand.
Late in 2025, Merriam-Webster named "slop" its Word of the Year, defining it as low-quality digital content produced in quantity by artificial intelligence. The word caught on because so many people had already started to feel it in their feeds, their inboxes, and increasingly, their vendors' pitch decks.
That sameness raises an uncomfortable question for any business investing in AI-assisted marketing, design, or content: if everyone is drawing from the same machine, what's actually left to differentiate one company from the next?
Increasingly, the answer being proposed across design and marketing circles is taste. Not taste as decoration, but taste as judgment: the ability to decide, out of everything AI can generate, what's actually worth putting in front of a customer.
Taste has a measurable business value, and it predates AI
This isn't just an aesthetic argument, but also a financial one, and the data existed before generative AI made it urgent. McKinsey's landmark study on the business value of design tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies across five years and multiple industries.
The top quartile of companies on McKinsey's resulting Design Index generated 32% higher revenue growth and 56% higher total returns to shareholders than their industry peers over that period which is a pattern that held in medical technology, consumer goods, retail and banking alike.
Design and judgment weren't "nice to have" then, and AI hasn't changed that. If anything, it's become more important with stakes being raised, because judgment is now one of the only inputs a competitor can't simply copy by using the same tools.
"Taste swap" is a warning sign, not a strategy
There's a term circulating in design and marketing communities worth borrowing: "taste swap", which means signaling sophistication through surface-level cultural cues instead of building anything of substance underneath it. It's an easy trap now that AI can make anything look instantly professional. But audiences are getting sharper at spotting it, not less.
Can AI ever develop its own taste?
Probably not in any meaningful sense, and that's not a temporary technical limitation; it's structural. Generative models reflect the patterns and choices embedded in their training data and in the decisions their builders made about what to optimize for. They don't have lived experience, and they don't have anything at stake in the outcome. Whatever gets made with AI still needs a human deciding what's actually worth making, saying, or shipping.
What this means for your team
- Hire and evaluate for judgment, not just portfolio polish. Portfolios increasingly look similar because the tools producing them are the same; look past the surface for a genuinely specific point of view.
- Protect time for people to actually make things, not just prompt and approve. Judgment that's never exercised doesn't stay sharp.
- Treat "taste swap" as a warning sign in your own marketing. Polished, AI-smoothed content with no real point of view underneath is exactly what increasingly fatigued audiences are learning to tune out.
- Measure design and creative judgment with real rigor. Don’t treat it as a subjective afterthought, but as a tracked input to business performance.
Key takeaways for B2B marketers
Design- and taste-driven companies have shown measurably better financial performance long before AI made this an urgent conversation. This isn't a new argument, just a newly urgent one. Now, more than ever, authenticity and distinctiveness become measurable market advantages and not just value statements, so they are worth tracking accordingly.
Do you want to know what this could mean for your team? Contact us to hear more.