Trust is becoming a competitive advantage in the age of AI

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the economics of trust - and not always for the better. The same technology that lets businesses detect fraud patterns at unprecedented scale is also making it cheaper and easier for bad actors to impersonate, scam and manipulate. As AI becomes embedded in everyday digital interactions, the question for business leaders is no longer just "how do we adopt AI?" but "how do we make customers feel safe using it?"

That question sat at the centre of Trust in an AI-Driven Digital Economy, an event held on 9 September 2026 at the Sammy Ofer Centre, London Business School. Organised by the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital (IEPC) in collaboration with Tanla, the Indian multinational cloud communications company behind a range of Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) solutions, the discussion brought together leaders from telecoms, finance and regulation to explore what it really takes to build trust into an AI-powered economy. The result was a clear message: trust is no longer just a technical problem to be solved with better algorithms — it's a business and organisational challenge that will define competitive advantage in the years ahead.

AI Is Changing the Economics of Trust

Opening the event, London Business School Dean Sergei Guriev set the tone by noting that the threat AI poses to digital trust is no longer theoretical. Deepfakes, impersonation and AI-enabled fraud have moved from being edge cases to becoming a standard part of the operating environment for both businesses and consumers.

The session, led by Professor Michael Jacobides, Sir Donald Gordon Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, explored how organisations should respond — and the consensus was that the answer lies less in deploying smarter detection tools and more in rethinking how trust is designed into products, partnerships and entire digital ecosystems.

A Case Study in Cross-Channel Defence

One of the event's most compelling examples came from Indonesia, where telecom operator Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH) partnered with Tanla Platforms to tackle a flood of scam and spam messages reaching customers. Tanla's Chief Customer Officer, Anshuman Kar, shared how the partnership used AI to block more than two billion scam attempts - a striking number, but one that comes with a deeper lesson attached.

The real insight wasn't simply that AI can filter out more fraudulent messages. It was that identity is the crux of the problem. Scammers rarely stay in one channel: they typically start victims off with a text message, move the conversation to WhatsApp, and finally escalate to a phone call - the point at which trust, and therefore vulnerability, is highest. Because fraud moves across channels this way, any effective defence has to operate across the whole ecosystem rather than being confined to a single platform.

Trust as a Product Feature

This cross-channel reality changes the strategic calculus for businesses. When customers can clearly see that a service helps them identify who's really contacting them - separating legitimate interactions from suspicious ones - that assurance becomes part of the product itself, not just a background safeguard. The event's discussion highlighted cases where this kind of visible protection measurably increased customers' willingness to engage.

That creates a genuine competitive opportunity. But it also creates a collective-action problem: protecting customers benefits not just the company making the investment, but the entire digital ecosystem around it. That means real progress often requires companies, technology providers, regulators and governments to collaborate, share information, and in some cases rework the rules altogether. The IOH case illustrated this well, involving partnerships that extended well beyond the core technology relationship to include Mastercard and the Indonesian government.

Trust as an Organisational Design Challenge

Perhaps the deepest lesson from the event is that AI is turning trust into a question of organisational design, not just technology. Businesses need to work out who is responsible for protecting customers, how the costs and benefits of that protection are shared across the ecosystem, and how trust itself can be measured and, ultimately, monetised. As the panel made clear, the central challenge is one of alignment, incentives and business design — algorithms are only ever part of the solution.

Other speakers reinforced this framing throughout the day. Natalie Black CBE of Ofcom addressed the governance dimension of AI-era trust, while Jonathan Larsen of DBS Bank argued that trust needs to be built into business strategy from the outset, rather than treated as a compliance checkbox bolted on afterward. McKinsey & Company Senior Partner Ramdoss Seetharaman also contributed to the discussion, bringing an industry-wide perspective on how firms across sectors are approaching the problem.

The Bigger Opportunity for Leaders

For business leaders, the implications go well beyond fraud prevention. In an AI-driven economy, the organisations that can credibly make customers feel safe stand to gain a real advantage over competitors offering the same underlying technology without the same assurance behind it.

Trust, in other words, is shifting from being a quiet assumption baked into digital transactions to becoming visible infrastructure - and, increasingly, a core part of the value proposition itself.