Organizational attention is all you need

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Organizational attention is all you need There is a widening delta between the cost of producing creative work and the cost of betting an organization’s resources on it. Aug 21, 2026

There is an uncomfortable truth I’ve been wrestling with these past few months. As the LLMs and harnesses we work with every day become increasingly powerful, I’ve noticed an innate need in most people—including myself—to rationalize the ways humans still creatively outpace the machines we’ve so quickly come to rely on. It started back in 2021, when GitHub launched Copilot and software engineers could suddenly autocomplete a function. “But it will never write interdependent logic.” Then ChatGPT arrived in 2022, and writers, consultants, and marketers could suddenly turn a blank page into a convincing first draft in seconds. “But it hallucinates. You can’t trust it with real work.” Then came Canva and Figma Make, producing design and prototype assets in minutes that previously took days. “But it doesn’t understand the brand.” Then Cursor and, the evolution of Claude Code, Codex, and Claude Design. With these tools, digital product development turned truly agentic. “But if I don’t give it the right context, it doesn’t perform well.” Enter 2026: the year of judgment and taste. “If I don’t at least guide it and review it, how will it ever be great at what it does?” Our creative community seems to be subconsciously flattering itself by asserting that some conveniently uncodifiable qualia is now what makes us better than the machines. Maybe. But the thing is: taste is an output that is trainable. Have a person tell a model what a high-quality output feels like enough times, at scale, and before you know it, that model starts developing taste. This isn’t theoretical. It’s the exact reason why your favorite AI tools keep generating more impressive outputs every year, with far less context and review needed from you to get there. As a result, it really doesn’t seem like work should be as hectic or as plentiful anymore. With every generation of improved outputs, you would think human workload would be lessening. And yet, we’re all busier than ever. Why? The title’s nod to Attention Is All You Need is intentional: as machine production becomes abundant, organizational attention becomes the constraint. What does that say about the future of human work? I think we need to take a hard look in the mirror and realize that millions of white-collar creatives will absolutely not be spending 40 hours per week helping AI making judgments on taste. But make no mistake: the jobs will still exist. That’s because taste isn’t the bottleneck in the precise sense that creatives believe. Rather, the bottleneck is already in the process of shifting from producing good work to getting organizations to absorb and act on more good work than ever before. Organizations’ capacity to metabolize change is a function of the number of people able to assist those organizations in the metabolization process. Those people have to sell change to higher-ups and external stakeholders, make the case for spending precious capital, and—whether anyone says this aloud or not—stake their very credibility on the change for which they advocate producing the expected results. This is still taste. In a sense. But it’s also something more. It’s accountability, too. AI will never replace the pairing of taste with accountability—the very foundation on which organizations make decisions about where to spend attention and resources. AI vendors have so much less to lose if they’re wrong than a human does. It’s been long understood that, in most B2B scenarios, people predominantly buy from other people, not businesses. There’s a reason most B2B software is not product-led—and why even companies that land initial customers that way still end up generating the vast majority of their revenue by utilizing human sales personnel to grow accounts. Well, it’s also been long understood that life is sales. The most effective creatives I know have always spent far less time creating output than they have aligning others around it and advocating for the organizational time and energy, across departments, required to absorb the creative change effectively. This part of the job is never going away. Organizational attention is finite, and only humans have enough metaphorical and literal skin in the game to credibly advocate for it.

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Organizational attention is all you need

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