Hiba Hassan, marketing and advertising expert.The polymath Michael Polanyi famously said that “we know more than we can tell”. He was talking about the secret ingredient that allows a craftsman to speak to the wood knowing its limits before breaking, the designer that can tell a layout is “off” by a single pixel, or the strategist who has this gut feeling that a campaign will take off or crash.
This is tacit knowledge: the silent, internal compass that guides us through the messy creative map with no pre-paved roads.
Soul vs. software
Explicit knowledge is a little bit different. It can be written, formalised thought; it can be extracted, measured, and transferred. Examples could be a recipe, a framework, or step-by-step processes that could be replicated by anyone who simply follows the steps provided.
Historically, we have placed so much weight on explicit knowledge; we devised frameworks, structures, and manuals that we can teach and evaluate with. However, we are in a market now that’s shifting drastically with the rise of Gen AI and its ability to execute with near perfection.
These complex, agentic systems have perfected the execution of explicit knowledge, they can follow frameworks, generate outputs that follow established patterns, and execute processes faster than humans.
Gen AI is built to execute the framework, but it cannot “feel” when a strategy has lost its soul. Judging whether a campaign aligns with culture, the audience, and the brand remains a uniquely human task requiring experience and judgment, not just instruction.
A machine cannot recognise when the framework itself is flawed. Even if we task AI with evaluating its own output against a strategic goal, that evaluation requires another layer of tacit knowledge – an intuitive sense of what success even looks like beyond the checklist to evaluate the output’s quality and handle exceptions.
Horizontal mastery
This gap between execution and judgment necessitates a surge in multidisciplinary thinking. Traditionally, mastering a discipline required immense cognitive load. By offloading the rote execution to AI, professionals face a critical deskilling if they stand still, but they also gain a massive opportunity.
This cognitive offload allows employees to pivot from narrow specialisation toward horizontal mastery, a cross-disciplinary synthesis of knowledge. This ability to connect insights across overlapping disciplines is what will ensure our coexistence and relevance in the age of AI.
I see the rise of art directors, copywriters, and marketers blending into new roles that oversee the entire creative communication journey. We are moving from being specialists in a single lane to becoming architects of the entire map.
Curated taste
As AI perfects the science of execution, our value shifts to the art of curation. The market is now flooded with flawlessly executed, yet often soulless, content. The new scarcity is taste. Taste is the ability to distinguish the meaningful from the mundane. It’s finding that one option that truly matters in the river of generated thousand outputs.
This creates an urgent need to pivot our educational and professional development away from competing with AI on its terms (speed, efficiency) and toward cultivating a point of view. This doesn’t mean that we ignore teaching people how to use the AI tools.
On the contrary we must learn the tools and the limitations so we can build skills on that knowledge-base; expanding upskilling efforts towards developing sophisticated filter, to recognise the subtle signals of quality, and to understand the strategic relevance of an output within the larger context.
In a world of infinite, machine-generated probabilities, the depth of intuition is our new goal. We need to be able to recognise when the data is leading us down a well-paved road to the average/mundane destination.
The final frontier
We are moving away from an era where “doing” was the primary marker of expertise. If our previous era was defined by the specialist who could follow a single route to perfection, this new era belongs to the polymath who can look at the entire landscape and decide which routes are worth taking.
When the interface of our work becomes an AI interaction, our primary responsibility is to protect the things that cannot be duplicated. This horizontal pivot is not about learning to prompt AI agents; it is more about reclaiming the “silent” dimension of our expertise.
AI has effectively commoditised explicit knowledge. By offloading the mental load of rote execution to agentic models, we finally have the capacity to be curious again. The most successful creatives of the next decade won’t be those who have mastered a single vertical manual, but those who can look at an AI-generated map and know exactly where to ignore the directions.
Our future is increasingly dependent on our ability to trust our tacit knowledge, what we know but cannot tell. We remain the ones who define the destination, when the machines handle the execution. We have arrived at a new era where “Jack of all trades, master of none, is often better than a master of one.”
By Hiba Hassan, UAE-based marketing and advertising expert
