The most important skill in the AI era? Taste, says a Wharton expert

Good taste is about well-cut clothes, chic interiors and, in the AI era, a potential strategy for standing out at work.

Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor told the April 30 episode of "The Education Equation with Jeremy Singer" that the technology is creating a "fundamental existential challenge" over how different kinds of intelligence are valued.

As that shift happens, "having a sense of style actually matters," Mollick, the author of "Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI," said.

In a world where most writing online is AI-generated and everything begins to sound the same, someone who can write with a "unique style ends up being more interesting," he said.

As generative AI has begun to enter the workplace, anxieties have centered on technical fields such as computer science and finance, which are seen as highly exposed to AI job displacement.

Some workers are finding reassurement in the idea that "human" skills, such as judgment, critical thinking, and communication, will remain harder to automate.

But Mollick said on the podcast that even some of those traditional "durable skills" can now be partly outsourced to AI.

"Those durable skills still seem durable, but they're also outsourceable to a degree they never were before," he said.

"There's enough studies that say the AI gives pretty good critical thinking. It gives you pretty good answers on ethical situations that ethicists would agree with," he said, adding that they will only get better with time.

Mollick's comments chime with what's become a topic of debate among some tech leaders in 2026 — whether taste is a key differentiator in the AI-powered workplace.

In February, Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, said that "taste is a new core skill," while Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham posted on X: "When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make."

However, Nan Yu, head of product at Linear, wrote on X that "you probably don't have better taste than AI."

He added: "There are plenty of other distinctly human things that we can contribute, but 'having better taste' isn't one of them."