Across product, ops, and CX teams, a new kind of role is taking shape: the person responsible for making AI actually work, day to day.

On July 16, three people living this shift join a live roundtable: Simone Santiago Broad (Yoco), Yelva Espinoza (Zumba Fitness), and Fin's Dave Lynch. You'll hear what the job really looks like across industries, how they carved out these roles, the skills they'd hire for, and the challenges they're tackling now. Bring your questions, since the best moments happen live.

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"I don't know what to post anymore,” my wedding planner confessed to me apologetically. I’m working with her this weekend for a wedding (gotta love a side hustle) and I cou;dn’t help but ask what she’s doing for growth.

"Every wedding looks the same."

I knew exactly what she meant. She wasn't talking about the weddings themselves. The ones she plans are stunnnnning. She meant the internet's version of weddings (except Taylor and Travis: PLEASE POST YOUR WEDDING PHOTOS!!!) If you spend enough time scrolling and eventually every florist starts arranging the same flowers, every dress starts looking the same, every photographer finds the same golden-hour shot. The work is still beautiful, which is almost what makes it unsettling. Nothing has become worse. Everything has become more similar.

The internet used to help us find references. Now it has become the reference.

For most of the internet's history, discovering beautiful things felt like the challenge. Algorithms solved a real problem. They surfaced the best restaurants, the best writing, the best design, the best fashion, the best wedding photography. That was genuine progress.

What happened next is the odd part.

The systems that help us discover beautiful things also became the systems that teach us what beautiful is supposed to look like. They reward what worked yesterday, then dole it back to everyone else as inspiration tomorrow. Over time, if we're not careful, we start confusing what has already been validated with what is actually good.

I think that's becoming one of the defining creative problems of the AI era.

The uncomfortable part is that I'm describing myself as much as anyone else!!! Half of my job is paying attention to what other smart people are making. I'm not standing outside the system judging it. I'm inside it, trying to figure out how to keep my own taste from turning into a group project.

That feels like a different conversation from the one most people are having about AI.

Everyone wants to know what AI will create. Can it write? Can it code? Can it design? Increasingly, the answer is yes. Creation is becoming abundant, and abundance has a habit of moving the bottleneck. When making something becomes easier, deciding what deserves attention becomes harder.

I'm starting to think the scarce resource isn't creation anymore.

It's judgment. Or maybe an even better word is taste.

Not taste as a synonym for aesthetics. Taste as recognizing something before consensus arrives. Taste as knowing what to ignore. Taste as resisting the gravitational pull of whatever already has the most likes, the largest audience, or the biggest training set.

The obvious objection is that none of this is new. Editors, curators, producers, DJs, teachers – people have always decided what comes next.

I think what's changing is the leverage.

When creation itself was expensive, production was the bottleneck. As creation becomes cheaper, arranging, filtering, framing, and introducing become disproportionately valuable. The people who shape what everyone encounters first increasingly shape what everyone creates next.

The phrase that keeps coming to mind is Reality DJs. I realize it's a slightly ridiculous name, but I haven't found a better one.

Creators make things. Reality DJs make meaning by deciding what comes next.

A DJ isn't valuable because they wrote every song in the room. They're valuable because they understand sequence. They know the exact same song can empty a dance floor at 9:30 and become unforgettable at 11:45. They understand that context changes experience. They know when not to play the obvious choice.

The sequence isn't just part of the experience. The sequence creates the experience.

Once I started looking for Reality DJs, I couldn't stop seeing them. The best teachers I've had didn't simply explain ideas well; they introduced them in an order that made curiosity feel inevitable. The managers I remember most weren't the ones with every answer. They were the ones who somehow knew which conversations needed to happen before everyone else realized they were necessary.

Even AI starts looking different through this lens. The more interesting question isn't only what it can generate. It's what it decides to surface. Which source becomes the summary instead of ten others? Which design becomes the template? Which answer becomes the first draft that millions of people build from? Those decisions don't just organize information. They organize attention. And attention, over time, organizes culture.

I keep coming back to my wedding planner because I don't think she had a content problem. I think she was describing a reference problem.

Spend enough time inside systems optimized to show you what already works and, slowly enough that you barely notice, the feed becomes your reference point. Your reference point becomes your taste. Your taste becomes your work. Your work becomes someone else's reference point. Eventually the internet stops being a place you visit for inspiration and becomes the place your instincts are formed.

That's incredibly useful if your goal is to understand the room.

It's much less useful if your goal is to notice something the room hasn't noticed yet.

Maybe that's the real creative challenge now.

Not producing more. Everyone is going to produce more.

The challenge is protecting the part of yourself that still knows what you noticed before someone else told you it was worth noticing.

Maybe the advantage isn't having better tools.

Maybe it's having a better relationship with your own attention.

Because if the internet has become our reference, the rarest creative act may be finding a reference that isn't already everyone else's.