Parliament | Taste Is the New Moat
Something we’ve talked about a lot at the office lately: technology can't teach discernment.
It can execute your vision with terrifying efficiency, but it can't tell you what your vision should be.
Taste—that ineffable ability to know what feels right, what resonates, what has staying power—isn't something you can prompt your way into.
It's cultivated through reference points, through understanding what came before, through knowing enough to know when to break the rules.
You can hand someone a professional camera, but that doesn't make them a photographer. Same deal with AI brand tools. The gap between having access and having taste is wider than ever, and that gap is your opportunity.
Apps Are Servants, Not Saviors
Here's the framework that matters: Don't chase apps that inform your brand. Decide who you are first, then find the app that helps you execute on that vision.
AI tools are incredible amplifiers. They can help you move faster, produce more, scale your aesthetic. But they're amplifying whatever you feed them. If you don't know who you are—if you haven't done the deep work of defining your Brand Being—you're just amplifying... nothing. Efficiently.
The companies winning right now aren't the ones with the best prompts. They're the ones who know exactly what they stand for, then use AI as an accelerant for that existing clarity. They're using Midjourney to execute their aesthetic, not to discover it. They're using Claude to scale their voice, not to create one from scratch.
If You Don't Have Taste, Find Someone Who Does
More than ever, we’re realizing that not everyone has great taste. That's fine. Knowing you don't have it is actually a form of taste in itself.
The founders crushing it right now are the ones who know their zone of genius and hire for their gaps. You're brilliant at product? Cool, hire someone who understands brand language. You're a financial wizard? Great, partner with someone who can translate that into a visual system that doesn't look like a PowerPoint from 2003.
This is where the Brand Being Methodology becomes essential. It's the infrastructure that helps you articulate who you are, even if you can't art-direct the execution. It gives you a north star so you can evaluate whether something feels right, even if you can't create it yourself.
The Slop Will Pass (But Your Brand Won't)
The brands that do the hard work now—the work of knowing who they are, cultivating a point of view that can't be replicated by a prompt—those brands will own the next decade.
Because here's the thing about brand: it compounds.
Every decision you make with intention builds on the last one. Your identity becomes more distinct over time, more impossible to fake, more valuable precisely because it can't be scaled by everyone with an AI subscription.
The Bottom Line
The AI era isn't about having better tools than your competitors. Everyone has access to the same tools. It's about having better taste—or being smart enough to partner with people who do.
So do the work to know who you are. Build your Brand Being from the inside out. Develop your aesthetic instinct. And if you can't? Find someone who can translate your vision into something that makes people stop mid-scroll and think, "Now that's different."
The slop will keep coming. But real taste? That never goes out of style.
