Explainer: What is digital trust in the intelligent age?

In the intelligent age, adoption rates, access to data, and interconnectivity are driving forces behind every successful enterprise. For every one of those parameters, the make-or-break factor is trust, and this is especially true for those who develop and deploy the next generation of digital technologies.

Trust cannot be automated. It isn’t something that’s going to emerge from the built environment or find itself in a new line of code or be trained up by a new large language model (LLM). Trust is something that the humans behind the technology must choose to earn, and then decide to make real through their work. For ICT companies, trust is a choice that must be baked into every other decision in the technology development cycle.

The World Economic Forum’s 2022 report Earning Digital Trust defined digital trust as the promise “that digital technologies and services – and the organizations providing them – will protect all stakeholders’ interests and uphold societal expectations and values”. Leaders in technology development earn trust when they set ambitious goals for security and reliability, to ensure accountability and oversight over their creations, and for the promotion of inclusivity, ethics and responsibility. They prove their dedication to those trustworthy goals by taking clear and measurable action on the dimensions of digital trust:

It is also important to recognize that trust is not static – rather the expectations held by individuals and their reasonable demands may expand over time. This is why today we recognize another dimension of digital trust – sustainability. As digital technologies increasingly consume resources, such as energy and water, a trustworthy technology company must consider sustainability as part of its obligations.

In a time of rapid change and technological development, earning digital trust fundamentally matters. This is especially true when the next generation of digital technologies are so-called smart or intelligent technologies and heavily rely on the collection and processing of data. Already, we are seeing cracks form in social trust – in part due to failure of cybersecurity or privacy protection as well as failures to take responsibility for the development of new technologies. This has soured the relationship between technology companies and governments, between innovators and institutions, and between tech and regular people.

In the last decade in the US, the tech sector, once regarded as the most trustworthy across all business lines, slipped to sixth in just four years with a third to a quarter of Americans (between 2022-2023) finding it less trustworthy than all other corporate sectors. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer Global Report, Innovation in Peril, found that significant pluralities believed that innovation was poorly managed (39% globally) and that technology was leaving them behind, with individuals signaling deep ambivalence about the most pronounced technological development, artificial intelligence (AI).

It's no wonder then that both individuals and governments are seeking to redefine society’s relationship with the tech sector. Where the sector has previously failed to uphold its side of the trust bargain, its rapidly losing its social license to operate and with it the capacity to ensure continued and growing adoption of its products. At the same time, as new AI models and applications demand ever increasing access to data pools and data lakes, increasingly frustrated individuals and corporate customers may find it’s much safer for their digital and actual lives to withhold their vital information, leading to a data drought.

But the tech sector need not accept the inevitability of mistrust – it can act to earn trust.

Given the transformational promise of AI and other intelligent technologies, virtually all industries and economies are not only looking for guidance on how to benefit from these technologies, but also how to adopt them responsibly. To illustrate the interest from industry, the Forum is actively engaging over 100 companies from a wide variety of industries to support the responsible adoption of AI, as part of the AI Governance Alliance. This wide interest exists because companies have many incentives to get this right, not only from an economic point of view, but also given the potential liability if the use of AI leads to undesirable outcomes.

This emphasis on responsibility means that these industries look at their technology suppliers (the ICT industry) for assurance that intelligent technologies are being developed and deployed with the same trust values in mind. As we’ve seen, trust is the result of conscious decisions by humans. As users need to make good decisions about responsible use of technologies, so do the leaders of ICT companies need to make conscious decisions about the trustworthy development and deployment of technologies.

The technology landscape of today is more and more interconnected and relies on multiple ICT providers deploying a wide range of intelligent technologies, from smart connectivity to internet of things (IoT) devices to the latest AI powered applications. In terms of responsible adoption, this creates an opportunity for leadership from ICT companies. The ICT sector can accelerate responsible adoption of intelligent technologies by speaking the same language and adhering to the same trust principles – like the ones proposed by the Forum – when developing and deploying its products and solutions.

Trust is in high demand. It may be the key factor enabling economies and people to thrive in the intelligent age. Now more than ever, consumers and industries need to feel confident that digital technologies and services – and the organizations providing them – will protect all stakeholders’ interests and uphold societal expectations and values.

For that reason, the ICT sector will need to show that they are strategically adopting the trust principles. Beyond making broad statements or merely throwing together a webpage on ethical AI, the sector must be more transparent about the specifics of how these principles are incorporated into the processes that guide their development and deployment of technologies.

Therefore, we asked several members of the Forum’s ICT Strategy Officers community how their company is strategically adopting the trust principles laid out in the Forum’s Digital Trust Framework. The result is a collection of insights organized along the three main digital trust goals:

We hope this is the start of a broader movement to encourage tech companies to be more explicit about the way they ensure their products and services are trustworthy, helping industries, economies and societies accelerate the responsible adoption of technology.