Are We Wrong About Taste?
Emerging Voices || Anabel Maldonado thinks so, and PSYKHE AI is her proof.
We’ve been told that taste is one of the few things AI can’t touch, that it’s too intuitive, too personal, and too human to ever be systemized. Anabel Maldonado has spent years proving otherwise.
For two decades, personalization technology has promised to know what you want, and largely failed. Not because the data wasn’t there, but because it was looking in the wrong place. Recommendation engines have refined their ability to show you more of what you already clicked on, serving a mirror image of your past behavior rather than anything genuinely attuned to you.
What’s missing, Anabel Maldonado argues, is the underlying model of the person, their psychology.
Maldonado is the founder and CEO of PSYKHE AI, an infrastructure layer for taste that encodes personality traits into product intelligence, profiling every item psychographically and matching it to users based on the Big Five model of personality, without prompts, search queries, or prior purchase history.
Her path here moved between two worlds that rarely meet: from neuropsychology and psychiatric research to a decade in luxury fashion, from journalism to the infrastructure layer she’s now built to bridge them. The through-line was always the same question: not what’s trending, but why you want what you want. Carmen Busquets, Net-a-Porter co-founder and the woman the New York Times called “e-commerce’s fairy godmother,” wrote the first $100K check. The $4.5M raised since has come from people who built commerce and retail: Madaluxe Group and Pierre N. Rolin of Ankh Impact Ventures; David Goubert, former president of Neiman Marcus and a fifteen-year Louis Vuitton veteran; and Bob Kupbens, former VP at Apple and eBay.
TL;DR: What you miss if you stop reading here
Taste isn’t random, but causal, structured, and computable. In this conversation, Anabel breaks down why personality is the most underestimated variable in taste, how her model translates across categories from fashion to grocery, and what it would look like for commerce to stop asking what you want and start surfacing who you are.
Every week, Emerging Voices spotlights a founder, creative, or strategist shaping what luxury becomes next. These conversations decode what’s changing, why it matters, and how to respond.
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