Critical thinking and discernment are the real competitive advantage for tomorrow’s marketers
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With so much talk of artificial intelligence in the news it’s easy to forget what powerful processors we possess inside our own skulls. “In Japan, researchers used another supercomputer, named ‘K’, to simulate human brain activity—for one second,” according to The Fountain. They found it takes 40 minutes of computing time to mimic the data a human brain can crunch in “just one percent of one second’s worth of human brain activity,” per top500.org.
That’s a lot of mental power we walk around with all day every day. To appreciate just how much, consider that in 2024, researchers from Harvard and Google determined the human brain possesses somewhere around 1.6 zettabytes of storage. That would equate to a data center “spanning 140 acres, making it the largest data center on the planet,” Tom’s Hardware reports.
And yet if you happen to pop on LinkedIn at any given moment, you will invariably encounter an endless buffet of AI-generated content, derisively dubbed “slop,” Merriam-Webster’s word of the year.
The problem is AI has democratized smarts, giving anyone and everyone the ability to spin up a marketing post that sounds clever enough on its face. At the same time, impressive generative tools can produce world-class images and videos.
So why aren’t we “entertained” to quote Gladiator?
Maybe it’s because our 1.6-zettabytes-of-storage-processors sense something is missing from today’s marketing conversations, something human.
I recently interviewed digital marketing pioneer Neil Patel on this subject, particularly about what skill marketers should cultivate to fill in the gap when AI can create virtually anything. I expected him to suggest something “practical” like prompt engineering or maybe data analysis.
Instead, he answered with a single word: Taste.
Unfortunately, that’s not a skill most marketers practice or think about nearly enough, he told me. That’s a real problem when you consider the fact AI can deliver voluminous information and outputs on any conceivable subject.
“AI will give you five, ten, even a hundred different variations. Sometimes what it produces is amazing. Sometimes it’s terrible. Only your uniquely human experience and skillset are what allow you to be discerning, to decide ‘this is the one I should use,’” says Patel.
To his point, could human taste be the real human competitive advantage for tomorrow’s marketers?
Best-selling author Dan Pink thinks so. In 2026 Inc. reported Pink’s commencement speech at Ohio’s Columbus College of Art & Design where he told graduates to lean into so-called “soft skills” now deemed suddenly practical. “Over the last four years at this amazing place, you built skills in animation, in fashion, in film, in photography, graphic design, games, fine art. But what you might not realize is that thanks to all of that, you have achieved something more important. You have developed taste. Aesthetic judgment. A point of view.”
Pink went so far as to suggest taste “will save you. It might even save us.” These insights, especially the emphasis on studying liberal arts subjects as tomorrow’s vocational advantage, echo my own reporting for Forbes.
Returning to Patel’s insight, he is careful to point out what taste isn’t. It’s not snobby aesthetics smacking of elitism or dogmatic artistic preference. Instead, he advocates leaning into contextual judgment, pattern recognition, and appreciating what matters and what may be perfectly fine to ignore.
“Critical thinking helps you better comprehend and determine which outputs are good and which are bad,” says Patel. A strong marketer with taste looks beyond surface-level data to grasp broader context. For instance, a sudden spike or drop in sales performance may have less to do with the campaign itself than external forces, such as an election, a holiday season, a global event like COVID, or a cultural moment AI may not fully appreciate.
This distinction between meaningful and meaningless data evokes signal versus noise, a communication concept formulated by the mathematician Claude Shannon. “The heart of his theory is a simple but very general model of communication: A transmitter encodes information into a signal, which is corrupted by noise and then decoded by the receiver,” explains Quanta Magazine. In other words, the valuable part of any message, the signal, can easily get tangled up in noise. A marketer with taste can see past the noise to find what’s meaningful, relevant and valuable to audiences.
Unfortunately, our education system doesn’t prize such critical thinking. “The issue is that many of our young people are not using their brains to critically think,” says Patel. “They’re just learning to just go with whatever is being outputted from AI. To their own detriment.”
“Cognitive offloading” is an apt term used to describe this problem roiling academia and the workplace. McGraw Hill Higher Education cites a study by Gerlich (2025) at SBS Swiss Business School that reveals an over-reliance on AI tools is eroding critical thinking abilities. “It is a natural tendency for humans to want to reduce their thinking workload when they have access to a tool that can do this for them efficiently. However, research may show that doing so repeatedly causes cognitive atrophy, much like when a muscle that isn’t being used shrinks.”
Patel worries that today’s students are perpetuating such mental atrophy by outsourcing judgment at the very time they should be learning to develop it. “Think about the student who copies homework right into an AI chatbot, then accepts the answers with little to no reflection if they are correct.”
This brings us back to the power of the human brain. We began this discussion by comparing its mental prowess to data centers, an increasingly common feature cropping up all over the United States as our economy grows ever more entwined with this technology. Reports citing human capabilities undoubtedly presuppose typical human brain proficiency based on effort. But what happens when we turn our brains off, outsourcing our minds to computers so we needn’t work so hard?
Easy. Cognition suffers. So does critical thinking, that uniquely human ability necessary for the cultivation and execution of taste. Put another way, we squander our own gifts at a time when we can least afford to.
Despite this danger, Patel is bullish on what comes next. “I think the future, especially for marketing, is humans plus AI combined,” he says. “The creativity that a human has, especially their ability to think outside the box is remarkable. When you combine AI’s increasing potential, one that grows by the day, with people, I really do think the possibilities are endless.”
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