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Three practices your team can use to train judgment the way art schools do, from Yuri's article in Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange.
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Everyone says taste matters. Nobody can say what it is.
In 2026 the people building AI started calling taste the critical skill of the era. Then someone asked them to define it. Building used to be hard, and that forced us to choose. Now it's a weekend project. It turns out most of us were never that good at choosing. We were just slow enough that nobody noticed.
"Experienced developers using AI were 19% slower. They believed they were 20% faster."
Taste is trained, not gifted
Correct is not right
AI produces work that is correct. Taste is knowing whether it's right.
The crit
Every Saturday at the Yale School of Drama, the work went on the wall and got taken apart. "I liked it" was never an answer.
Check the call
Judgment that never meets an outcome drifts toward status. Write the call down before you know the result. Then go back and look.
Talk to the argument
An AI version of Yuri, trained on his writing, talks, and interviews. Ask how a principle applies to your work, your team, or your career. It can answer almost anything. Except what he should make next.
Talk to Yuri AIAI-powered
Find your AI-era advantage
Tell us about your creative training and what you're up against. Get practical ways to turn your taste into the edge AI can't copy.
Inside the book
Thirteen chapters in four parts. Each pairs a scene from the studio or the stage with history, and ends with a practice for individuals and a section for leaders.
Part 1
The Artist's Operating System
Correct versus right, the Saturday crit, seeing patterns across fields.
Part 2
Artists in Every Tech Revolution
Rubens's studio, the camera, the Swiss watch crisis, why the middle gets automated.
Part 3
Translation
Speaking business while thinking art, execution as craft, the career as a series of acts.
Part 4
The Studio Is Open
AI as crew, your inputs as your moat, what stays human, why different wins.
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About Yuri
Yuri Cataldo has spent his career moving between the studio and the boardroom. He trained as a theatrical designer at Indiana University, The Juilliard School, and the Yale School of Drama, where he earned his MFA, and designed for theater, opera, film, and television. He founded the award-winning beverage brand IndigoH2O, built the creative entrepreneurship curriculum at Emerson College, and earned his MBA at MIT Sloan. He hosts the Advance Your Art podcast, where he interviews creative entrepreneurs about how they built careers from their work. Today he is Business Lead for Physical AI at Autodesk and the builder of EMBA Collective, an AI-matched network for executive MBAs.
Book Yuri to speak
Everything But Taste: judgment in the age of AI
What business can learn from art school
AI as crew: directing instead of executing
Upcoming: Yale and Brown, 2026-27
Has spoken at: MIT, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford