It’s the beginning of its exponential moment.
Is your feed a slopfest?
Yes. Worried your taste is dying?
Yes. Wondering if your eye for style still counts? Yes.
Good.
This is not the end of your taste. It’s the beginning of its most valuable moment in history.
….
The slop is real.
Open Instagram. TikTok. YouTube. LinkedIn. Each one a potential slop tray. Unless you’ve got the taste to curate it. Subscribe. Unsubscribe. Follow. Unfollow.
Open your inbox. Watch the marketing of half the brands you used to admire. AI has flooded the world with mediocre content faster than anyone predicted. Slop versus slop equals slop.
And founders are scared. Scared their judgement is becoming irrelevant. Scared the years of scars they built their careers on don’t count anymore. Scared the next 30-year-old with a Claude account is going to eat their lunch.
Entrepreneurs: 93% overwhelmed. 77% lonely. 100% the bottleneck. Now AI on top of all that.
But here’s what most founders are missing.
The slop is the drip tray at a bar. Not the top shelf.
….
Photo: Clive Burcham & Alfie Dawson in Soho, New York City.
Last week I sat down with Alfie Dawson. Founder of Bordeaux & Burgundy. A mega-B2B-agency operating across the US and UK. 30 years old. Growing at over 100% in 2026. Just closed one of their biggest enterprise contracts ever, scaling AI-augmented creative production at a previously unimaginable volume, in a much shorter time frame.
Alfie has deployed Claude across his entire team. He’s built systems nobody else in the B2B agency world has built. He could be a young guy deluded by the promises of AI.
He isn’t.
Here’s what he said:
“You still need someone with judgement, experience, and understanding of what makes something great and what makes something bad.”
But then the moment that went BOOM:
“How do you ever get something (a thing) to have taste?”
That’s a young marketer asking the question. Using AI more aggressively than almost anyone in his industry. And the question he’s circling is…. how do you get something to have taste?
….
Taste is the artist who knows when to take the final stroke. Otherwise the canvas ends up black.
Taste is the photographer who knows when to push the shutter on the millionth frame.
Taste is Tor Myhren, Apple’s Marketing VP, who said at Cannes…. to AI, a tear is salt and water. To us, it’s memories. Joy. Sadness. The accumulation of generations of DNA, trauma, and love.
Taste is knowing when my kids need a hug…. (more likely, them knowing when to hug me).
Taste is Biebs on stage at a record-setting Coachella, knowing his stripped-back, deconstructed performance hit harder than any over-the-top theatrical pop spectacle.
You can’t train that.
In practice, what does this “taste-making” actually look like?
You become the editor of a thousand drafts. Not the writer of one. You generate ten options. You pick the one with soul and finesse.
You override the model when the data’s right but the gut’s wrong.
You spend a little less time making. Much more time asking deeper questions, judging.
That’s the new craft. And it’s earned the same way old craft was earned. Reps. Wins, Loses, Scars. Time in the chair.
The machine gets faster. The judgement still has to be the human touch.
The world is about to be drowning in mediocre content, mediocre advice, mediocre judgement. The premium on taste, on the human eye, on knowing the difference, is going through the roof.
Your taste is about to be worth more than it’s ever been worth.
Don’t be slop.
Be the big, bold, taste-making human in the room AI can’t replace.
My best for your best, Clive
Create New Futures.
