Why Reframing Trust for a post-AI world is the answer

“Trust is risky. It’s vulnerable. It’s a leap of faith…The more we trust, the farther we can venture.” – Esther Perel

This year’s Horasis Global Meeting is set to take place in South America for the first time, hosted in Vitória, the capital of Espírito Santo, Brazil. This premier event will highlight Vitória’s pivotal role in fostering connections between the North and South, as well as between Eastern and Western nations. The meeting serves as a platform for leaders to bridge divides in an increasingly unbalanced world and to address the most urgent challenges facing societies today and tomorrow, including climate change, inequality, peace, and trust. Focused on “Building Bridges to the Future,” the event will bring together renowned entrepreneurs, ministers, and representatives of civil organizations from around the globe to discuss how to turn multiplying and overlapping disruptions into tailwinds for strategic courage, sustainable solutions, and long-term trust.

The management theorist Peter Drucker once said: “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” This could be the headline news for leaders and policymakers today as they grapple with a Geopolitical Risk and Tech Supercycle, talent shortages, and industry convergence. It’s disruption everywhere and all at once and shocks upon shocks. With economic headwinds and tech disruption an everyday reality, leaders should not waste one of the most significant reframing moments to bridge divides because the future isn’t just about technology and trends. It’s about trust, too. Without trust, societies break down, resources are wasted, and cultures decay. How do we sustain trust in our institutions during record levels of distrust, global fracturing, and AI-driven misinformation? Is it time to reframe trust for a post-AI world?

Trust on the ballot

A collision of trust, politics, and leadership has led to a record decline of trust in our leadership and institutions, from the media and government to NGOs and businesses.  As reported in Gallup, six in ten employees worldwide don’t feel trusted at work, and only 20% of US workers say ‘they have a best friend at work,’ resulting in $8.8 trillion in lost productivity. According to Edelman’s annual trust barometer, businesses still lead on trust, but it scores below 60 percent, while the media is actively distrusted. A cursory look at WEF Davos’s agenda over the last few years reveals the red lights flashing on the leadership and trust dashboard. Themes such as ‘Restoring Trust,’ ‘The Future of Trust,’ and ‘Trust in AI’ are common. And while I frequently see moonshots for technology, I rarely see a moonshot for Trust. This matters because losing the trust of stakeholders worldwide has dire consequences for bridging divides and navigating through accelerating technology, economic, and geopolitical disruption.

An exchange of trust defines every decision and interaction, and yet, at no time has trust been more tested in each other. Trust is facing its moment of truth. George Orwell, best known for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, would have relished these times. Fake news, false facts, meme warfare, data breaches, tainted food, and digital skulduggery. It’s not our imagination. More organizations are operating at the edge of ethics in pursuing profits, and trust and transparency are under scrutiny by regulators, media, talent, and customers. The relentless demands of leading in a world of hyper-speed mean that leaders have an institutional bias to ‘move fast and break’ things rather than ‘slow down and fix things.’ The commercial and human implications of trust and ethical breaches are significant, with the impact on businesses alone estimated to cost organizations billions of dollars globally in lost productivity. Societies lose faith in their politicians to do the right thing and become more anxious about losing their jobs to AI, robots, and algorithms. According to Hack Future Lab estimates, 10 out of 15 industry sectors have reported a collapse in trust over the last three years, and there are plenty of examples to explain why, from the collapse of FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges with a market cap of $32 billion, to the culture of secrecy at The British Post Office that saw over 700 ‘sub-postmasters’ prosecuted for theft and false accounting when shortfalls in money were, in fact, due to errors of the Post Office’s flagship Horizon Accounting Software. 

Underhyped vs. Overhyped

Will AI be the most disruptive force in history? Embracing AI responsibly is not just an option – it’s an ethical priority. AI could solve the energy crisis, add trillions to the global economy, or wipe out the human race. When grasping how AI could reshape business, consider the other significant innovation of our time: GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy. Both aid in weight loss by suppressing cravings. AI could become the equivalent of a corporate Ozempic encouraging CEOs to shed excess weight in their firms and make record layoffs. As Scott Galloway, Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, writes in his blog No Malice/No Mercy: “Similarly, my thesis is that firms (notably tech companies) have also discovered a weight loss drug and are also being coy about it. Recent financial news features two stories: layoffs and record profits. These are related. There’s no mystery to the surface narrative. A company lays off 5%, 10%, or even 25% of its workforce, and, 6 to 12 months later, after severance pay and expenses are flushed through the P/L, its operating margin hits new heights.”  Perhaps AI is already playing a larger role in layoffs than CEOs are willing to admit.

AI’s future is more than a new trust challenge for leaders, entrepreneurs and policymakers to overcome. We’re on the brink of a Cambrian tech revolution that could spur hyper-innovation and growth but also deepen inequality, lower labor demand, and reduce hiring as AI applications execute many tasks currently performed by humans. The IMF’s latest research warns that up to ‘40% of jobs will be impacted by AI and about 60% of employment in advanced economies.’ According to the WEF, ‘half the global labor force will need reskilling by 2025’. An inclusive, trust-led, AI-enabled future is not guaranteed, and leaders must keep an eye on the future, especially regarding skills diversification, ethics and guardrails. Is trust your #1 value? If not, why not? Bridging divides demands courage from all of us to rethink leadership in a post-AI world. 

Thinkers50, the global ranking authority of leading management thinkers, has described Terence Mauri as ‘an influential and outspoken expert’ on the future of leadership.’ His upcoming book, The Upside of Disruption: The Path to Leading and Thriving in the Unknown, is due out on September 4.

Learn more:

25-26 October 2024, Vitória, Brazil

Building Bridges to the Future

https://horasis.org/horasis-global-meeting/

Credit for article’s featured photo: Hack Future Lab