ITIC UK 2025 | How AI is teaching us to trust again

The ITIJ team are reporting live from ITIC UK in Southampton. Read all the reports here.

Miriam Boote, Managing Director, and Adam Hill, Founder, Designate

Opening, Boote said: “Fundamentally, trust is a human emotion.”

Boote indicated that the impression of AI as a risk has decreased from 82% in 2023 to 68% in 2025, showing a growth in trust in the emerging technology.

Boote then gave an update on the number of people that are using AI agents and having their calls resolved in under two minutes: in just one month, Klarna received 2.3 million calls and 70% of them were resolved in the two-minute window, which Boote said equated to the work of about 700 staff and saving US$40 million a year. Boote added: “The adoption of AI agents is immense, it’s huge.”

Truth and lies

Hill then discussed the issue of lies and deception by AI and the consequences and repercussions of an AI giving the wrong information. He showed an example of Claude 3 Opus, and how it offered to make an obfuscation and lie in order to maximise profits. Boote then displayed a short video that demonstrated that AI can not only lie but also actively steal.

Fostering trust

However, Boote pointed out that “AI can help foster trust” if your brand is able to demonstrate six key areas:

• Transparency and accountability
• Personalised, consistent experiences
• Data-driven honesty
• Bias reduction
• Proactive problem-solving
• Authentic engagement.

“There is a bedrock of trust that can be built,” said Boote. There was a warning, though, that “AI can suck the personality out of your business and brand”.

AI has its limitations, said Boote, and she pointed out a couple of characteristics of AI, firstly that it doesn’t have original thoughts, and secondly that it is memorable, boring and repetitive, leading to the assertion that “AI would never have come up with the new Jaguar brand”, and many other examples that support that perspective.

Connections

The power of connection with AI was emphasised by Hill, and not only is it able to connect points of interest and meaning through the data, but he asserted that: “In all our businesses, AI should be part of every department, to push us and to empower our workforce.” He used the example of AI revolutionising the consumer market, taking the old model of Argos with a product and an exchange, and comparing it with Amazon, where you buy a product and then it tells you what other products have been bought by people who bought the same thing.

Recognising trusted brands

Hill indicated that recognising trust was currently exclusively a human quality. He pointed out that the current AIs were able to “identify signals that correlate with trusted brands” in four core ways:

• Sentiment analysis: AI can analyse sentiment in millions of customer reviews to measure positive or negative perceptions
• Natural language processing: natural language processing can identify specific trust markers in consumer conversations, such as reliability, honesty, and consistency
• Brand perception: brand perception algorithms can track metrics like customer retention, complaint resolution rates, and repeat purchase behaviour
• Social listening: social listening tools can monitor conversations about brands across platforms to identify trust-related themes.

Indicating that trust and connection is uniquely human, Hill said that the artificial nature of AI means that it is able to take “information from so many places”, consequently: “It reveals you to both your direct customers and your end users.”

Further pointing out the importance for businesses and brands to stand out, Hill warned: “In a world of mass AI adoption, every sector’s communication is at risk of being normative.”

Symbiosis

Concluding the presentation, Boote entreated the audience: “Brand loyalty and trust will be lost and gained by authentically human built messaging, powered by AI trusted tools. Now is the time to take action to ensure trust is not lost. Know how you want your brand to behave.” Using a hybrid method of humans and AI will impact on your brand.

A question from the audience was asked: “Can we trust AI with DEI?” Boote responded: “Some of the narrative coming out of the USA [makes this] tricky.” She said that the largest trillion-dollar companies that will be adopting AI are all run by white men. “It’s something we need to be careful of.” Boote gave an example of Beyoncé winning an award, and the news being suppressed on X because she was a Black woman.