Businesses that prioritize and build trust will thrive in Web3: Here's why

Digital transformation has swept across sectors for two decades. Having propelled innovative business-to-business startups, direct-to-consumer pioneers and social media platforms at the dawn of Web2 to the top of their categories, it is giving way to a new wave: “the trust transformation”.

Digital transformation ushered in the adoption of cloud computing, eventually layering in machine learning (ML) and the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT). This resulted in the mass centralization of data on businesses and people.

This gave rise to the social media behemoths, funded by advertising, who defined and dominated Web2 – the social web. They amassed substantial influence because of the volume of personal data they possessed, allowing them to power the growth of brands. During this time, growth – and speed of growth – outweighed everything.

The major pitfall with digital transformation is that it productized consumers, as privacy, safety and representation were only afterthoughts in its inception and throughout its evolution. As consumers’ attention became the ultimate lever of revenue, businesses prioritized data extraction at any cost. As a result, privacy breaches have become the new normal, misinformation is weaponized for eyeballs, and bias and toxicity dominate online discourse.

These consequences have now swung the pendulum from a data-centric social web to the people-centric semantic web we are entering, with the awakening of new generations demanding respect for their identities and data dignity.

As consumers are awakening to the value they hold – and how they expect to be treated in exchange for that value and their trust – we have seen the sunset of cookies, the introduction of privacy statutes, and a widespread battle with social media around addressing toxicity.

In this new environment, businesses can demonstrate their trustworthiness by prioritizing ethical pillars like privacy, safety, and diversity, both externally and internally, through the following: privacy protections through consent management by design; online safety measures through robust content moderation; and inclusion efforts through diversity by design, from product design to accessibility.

Businesses that respect and preserve their consumers’ identities and data dignity in the new era of Web3, a semantic web powered by artificial intelligence (AI), IoT and immersive technologies, will earn their trust. And when businesses invest in building this robust trust net, they can establish a continuous exchange of information sharing and value between the consumer and the brand.

In the past six months, we have witnessed a watershed moment of mass adoption of generative AI. The explosive growth of data since the inception of the semiconductor (followed by the PC, internet, cloud, mobile, social and big data movements) led to this moment. The large corpus of data allows the machine – AI – not only to optimize our life but also to assist us to create.

This computation revolution invited scepticism around its impact on human civilization. We have seen early signs of security loopholes introduced into code, the hastened spread of misinformation and toxicity, and questionable representation due to biased data used for training. These concerns have rallied support for stricter guardrails that prioritize safety and ethics and accelerate the trust transformation.

Tech execs and leading scientists have called for a pause in the technology, saying it shouldn’t be deployed until there’s confidence that its “effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.” The Biden administration is even considering regulatory oversight of generative AI: “We know that we need to put some guardrails in place to make sure that they are being used responsibly,” said Alan Davidson, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information.

The unprecedented speed with which Capitol Hill has mobilized hearings to address the potential risks of generative AI, particularly when compared against the years it took for Congress to take a closer look at social media, reflects an increasing urgency around the need to guide technology with an ethical lens.

This transformational technology holds incredible promise. It’s not the generative AI we should push back on. It’s the development discipline and the use of the technology we should focus on making more ethical. We need to be disciplined from the get-go to ensure diversity of the data used for model training. We need to moderate prompts and results to ensure civility, leverage reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to de-incentivize inappropriate behaviours and make endeavours for technology accessibility across the global footprint.

As the collective outcry around responsible development and deployment of generative AI illustrates, the trust transformation represents a clear shift in the collective public, corporate and government consciousness. And as this movement takes hold, it will shape the next generation of products, services and experiences. We stand a chance to get it right at the onset this time around.

CEOs, boards and C-suites all have a role to play in ensuring trust permeates every aspect of the business – from consumer marketing to diverse hiring and security guardrails. The definition of “trust” evolves with our society and as the technological paradigm shifts. It is critical to dedicate a C-suite role, Chief Trust Officer, and a P&L to drive trust transformation for the businesses.

Once an afterthought and a cost centre, trust and ethics are quickly ascending to become a critical profit centre, strategic driver and brand differentiator.

The companies that dominate the corporate landscape today are the ones that succeeded in achieving an accelerated and effective digital transformation. In the same way, the trust transformation will define the winners and losers of the next generation. Companies that will loom largest 15 years from now are the ones that are actively cultivating trust today.