Contently: The future of content belongs to the tastemakers

Alex Soto published this piece on Contently’s Content Strategist blog in March 2026. The argument is built on a single observation: AI has made content production so inexpensive that volume is no longer a reliable differentiator. What still differentiates brands is the ability to consistently choose what is worth publishing and what is not — a capacity Soto calls taste.

The article is addressed to VP-level and CMO-level content leaders, and it treats editorial judgment as a strategic asset rather than a production function. When AI writes the first draft, the scarce resource is not words — it is the ability to evaluate those words against the brand’s actual purpose, audience expectations, and long-term positioning.

Soto defines taste in operational terms: “the ability to consistently distinguish what fits from what doesn’t.” This is not aesthetic preference. It is the informed application of principles — about audience, about credibility, about what the brand is actually trying to accomplish — to individual decisions about whether a piece of content meets the bar or does not. A content leader with good taste makes that call quickly and consistently. A content process without it produces volume that is individually acceptable and collectively incoherent.

The practical recommendations are specific. First, build an internal reference set: a curated collection of the team’s best-performing content, annotated with the factors that made each piece effective. This gives new team members and AI tools a concrete target rather than abstract brand guidelines. Second, establish two or three editorial principles that are flexible enough to apply across formats — principles about clarity, specificity, or the kind of claim the brand makes — rather than rigid checklists that produce compliant but predictable work. Third, present data showing which content drives disproportionate results. When a fraction of output accounts for most of the impact, the argument for reducing overall volume and raising the bar on individual pieces becomes easier to make to stakeholders who measure success by quantity.

On the question of timing, Soto estimates one quarter to see measurable improvement after shifting from quantity-focused to judgment-based content decisions. The lag is real because the effects of reducing low-quality output — improved signal-to-noise for audiences, reduced brand dilution — take time to appear in metrics that leadership tracks.

This article is most useful for content leaders who are responsible for defining what good looks like inside their organization, particularly those managing teams that have recently adopted AI writing tools and are seeing output volume increase without a corresponding increase in content quality.