Justin Bartak · AI Product · February 17, 2026 · 3 min read ·
AI Will Commoditize Everything Except Taste
TL;DR
When capability becomes commodity, the only remaining differentiation is the experience. Taste is the last moat.
Most AI conversations start with the model. Which is faster. Which is smarter. Which scores higher on benchmarks nobody outside a research lab will ever care about.
This is the wrong conversation.
Within eighteen months, every team will have access to the same foundational models, the same APIs, the same fine-tuning frameworks, the same retrieval patterns. Capability is converging. Not slowly. Rapidly. And when capability becomes commodity, something else becomes the differentiator.
Taste.
The convergence nobody is pricing in
GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, Llama. The gap narrows with every release. What was a six-month advantage becomes a six-week advantage becomes no advantage at all.
The infrastructure is converging too. Vector databases. RAG pipelines. Agent frameworks. Every component of the AI stack is becoming available to everyone at roughly the same cost.
The most important question in AI product development is no longer what can we build?
It is how should it feel?
That question has no technical answer. It requires taste.
Taste is an economic argument
Taste is the judgment about how intelligence shows up in a product. What to show. What to hide. When to intervene. When to stay silent. How to compress a thirty-step workflow into three without losing the decisions that matter.
When every competitor has the same model, the same pipelines, and the same infrastructure, the only remaining differentiation is the experience. The experience is shaped by taste.
Taste is not polish. Taste is the moat.
The proof
At Taxa, we built an AI-native tax platform that secured $113M in funding. Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer had the same AI capabilities. The same tax codes. Decades more data.
We had a question: What if Apple built this?
In five months, with a team of four, we built a product that compressed thirty-step workflows into three interactions. Clients did not ask about the model. They looked at the product and said: this is the first time tax software felt like something I wanted to use.
$113M did not follow a better algorithm. It followed a better product.
What cannot be automated
AI can generate interfaces, write code, suggest layouts. What it cannot do is decide what should exist. It cannot feel that a workflow is one step too many. It cannot know that the most powerful thing the system can do in a given moment is nothing.
AI accelerates execution. It does not replace judgment. The more execution is automated, the more judgment matters. The more judgment matters, the more taste becomes the defining competitive advantage.
This is not a temporary condition. It is the permanent state of the AI economy.
Capability is converging to commodity. Infrastructure is converging to commodity. Even speed is converging to commodity. Taste is the last moat. And the companies that understand this first will define the decade.
See this in practice: Taxa AI-native tax platform and human control of AI.
Related reading: Building AI-Native Apps with Taste, AI-Native vs. Bolt-On AI, and Most AI Products Are Just Bad Software.
