The Ratio Shift
Human attention is scarce. Background AI will dominate.
There's a ratio between "AI that talks to humans" (chatbots, copilots, interfaces) and "AI behind the scenes" (pipelines, agents, automation).
Right now, most AI discourse focuses on the human-facing side. Chatbots. Assistants. Copilots.
But human attention is fixed. AI capability is expanding. This ratio can only shift in one direction.
The Inevitable Direction
Today: [Human-facing AI ████████] [Background AI ██]
Tomorrow: [Human-facing AI ██] [Background AI ████████████████]
More and more will happen without human attention. Not because humans are replaced, but because there's only so much attention to go around—and AI can handle the rest.
Why This Matters for Taste
Here's the key insight: ALL of it needs taste.
Every pipeline, every agent, every automated decision embodies judgment. Without explicit taste encoding, that judgment defaults to "average"—whatever the model learned from its training corpus.
With encoded taste, that judgment becomes yours. Your philosophy. Your constraints. Your standards. Deployed at scale.
The Bottleneck Shifts
| Era | Bottleneck |
|---|---|
| Pre-AI | "Can we build it?" |
| Early AI (2023) | "Can we build AI?" |
| Current | "Do we know what good looks like?" |
| Future | "Is our taste encoded and deployed?" |
The companies that win won't be the ones with the most AI. They'll be the ones whose AI embodies coherent judgment.
Implication
Don't just think about chatbots. Think about all the decisions happening without human attention.
- How are leads being qualified?
- How are support tickets being triaged?
- How are documents being summarized?
- How are recommendations being generated?
Each of these is a taste deployment opportunity. Each one either embodies your judgment or defaults to generic.
Contrarian To
"AI is about human-AI collaboration."
Partially. But most AI will run without human attention. The collaboration happens upstream—when you encode the taste that shapes all downstream decisions.
The Strategic Question
Not "should we build a chatbot?" but:
"What decisions are being made without human attention, and whose taste are they embodying?"