Why digital trust matters
The mosquito has been buzzing around my head half the night. Sometime before dawn a storm passes overhead. We’re in the mountains, and it's a biggie. Peals of lightning split the night. Thunderclaps continue to ring in my ears after the storm moves on. Combined with the low-level itch from a crop of recent bites, sleep is elusive. Finally I whip the sheet off and turn on the light. Time to get this newsletter started.
Trust in digital services (a.k.a. digital trust) probably isn't a topic that keeps you awake at night. But worries about whether that drop-shipped product you ordered will ever arrive, or whether you should listen to the tai chi guru who keeps popping up in your feed? Tick.
It's becoming ever harder to know who or what is real online, whether that's a proposal you suspect was generated in seconds by feeding your LinkedIn profile to ChatGPT, an SMS message purportedly about a missed delivery, or an image depicting a world leader in an uncompromising situation.
Almost everyone I ask recently has been scammed online, or only escaped by a hair's breadth. Meanwhile an unrelenting wave of data breaches and identity fraud has woken us up to the fact that once our data is in the hands of less-than-trustworthy actors, it’s out there for good.
I’m struck by the parallels with last night’s experience. Worrisome digital experiences are an irritant, like a mosquito buzzing around your head, until a fraudulent transaction or malicious account takeover opens your eyes to the dangers that were present all along, like lightning revealing a darkened landscape.
The stakes are escalating. Personal AI agents promise remarkable and useful experiences, but only if we’re willing to entrust them with an unprecedented amount of personal information, and the power to (trans)act on our behalf. In the business arena, data collaboration is vital for process automation, supply chain resilience, sustainability and compliance, yet business partners won’t play ball if they worry about trade secrets leaking. Meanwhile the spectre of massive job cuts hangs over corporate AI experiments.
Digital trust has always been an existential issue for technology vendors. Your product or service might enable businesses to solve a problem 10x faster but if your pitch comes across as more hype than substance, or lacks clarity on key topics like the use and retention of customer data, you won’t get the chance to prove it.
The speed at which AI is advancing makes efforts to improve digital trust ever more urgent. My intention for this newsletter is to find out what digital trust success (and failure) looks like, by speaking with those on the frontline of tackling the trust gap.