Trust in the age of innovation

Built slowly, lost quickly, worth everything

Trust has always been the foundation of enduring relationships. It’s the thing that determines whether a relationship can hold any weight at all. But right now, earning and keeping it has never been harder.

We’re dealing with a world with lots of heightened anxieties from income disparity and regional conflicts to ideological divides. People’s trust in institutions is at an all-time low, and the increasing polarization has turned into insularity, which further fuels a pervasive sense of distrust and skepticism, or at best, trust is reserved for the very familiar and the local. In a world full of information and access to opportunities, more people are feeling their world is getting smaller and disconnected. This retreat toward the familiar is the central finding of the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer released earlier in January: seven in ten people globally say they’re unwilling to trust someone with different values, backgrounds, or information sources.

Plus, building trust takes time and repetition, neither of which we have in abundance with the breakneck pace of innovation and the ever-changing conditions. Even the most consistent of decisions and actions might not find their context or audience in the same place as a few weeks prior. If you’re an existing company like Google, NVIDIA, or Microsoft, your existing trust factor can be an asset to leverage, but it’s not without risks to the overall reputation. If you’re a new company like Anthropic, OpenAI, or Perplexity, you’re building the trust bank and making deposits as you go. There’s simply not enough data yet in these newer relationships, which means every decision and action is an opportunity to build and signal a pattern recognition between what you say and do.

This is why we’re watching each and every move the leaders of the AI companies are making with bated breath, from Dario Amodei holding Anthropic’s red lines at the cost of its federal contracts, and Sam Altman stepping in for OpenAI hours later, to Jack Dorsey’s call to cut Block’s workforce drastically citing AI and productivity gains as the reason. As a consumer, customer, stakeholder, and perhaps an employee or a shareholder, we’re trying to read each message and action to figure out three things:

• Who thinks, speaks, and acts like me? Affinity is often the first signal we read in other people — whether that’s shared background, dialect, or worldview — and we trust it quickly because familiarity feels like safety. We’re drawn to people who reflect something of ourselves back to us. Coming from a similar socioeconomic or cultural background as any of these leaders won’t automatically mean your values are aligned with theirs, but the more initial signals that feel “local” to you, the more willing you’ll be to extend trust, especially now, when so much feels unfamiliar.

• Who gets me? Attunement is the next layer of trust signal. Regardless of existing affinity signals, if I feel that someone is attuned to my needs, wants, and motivations, it will be easier for me to relate to and trust them because they’re genuinely willing to understand me and my context. It tells me they’re paying attention, and that they care.

• Who’s got my back? Accountability is the deepest layer of trust signal that builds with a consistent set of words and actions, especially ones that directly address one’s needs, wants, and motivations. At the end of the day, we’re all living and working towards certain goals for ourselves as well as for those we care for emotionally, financially, and in many other ways. Nothing builds trust more enduringly than when someone consistently shows up for you — regardless of formal or contractual obligation.

Trust signals don’t only live in press conferences and public stances. They show up in the product experience, in how customer service responds when something goes wrong, in what integrations get built, and above all, in the omissions, edits, and absences. The small decisions accumulate. They always do.

We’re in a moment of progress and disruption, one that requires a renewed sense of hope, possibilities, and imagination from all of us. Without trust in each other, in our leaders, and in institutions that are making the most consequential moves, this kind of mindset is difficult to harness and share with everyone. I want to bet on a future grounded in trust. And for that to be possible, we must treat trust the way we treat any other asset worth building – with gravity, intent, and patience. That’s how we break the insularity cycle — and innovate together. Because trust is a foundation, not a feature.