Trust is dead. Can the ‘Chief Trust Officer’ revive it?

Who do you trust? If you’re like most Americans, you might not have a lot of faith in government, business, the media, or other Americans, as each has seen declines in trust over decades. Add data breaches, convincing AI deepfakes, and a lack of transparency around how tech works and business operates, and it’s easy to see why America is in a full-blown trust crisis.

To try to repair the rift, some companies have added a new executive to the ever-bloating C-suite that has recently become home to chief experience officers, chief diversity officers, and chief medical officers. The latest addition: the chief trust officer. This small but growing cohort of tech experts is charged with working to protect data, answering questions around the efficacy and safety of AI, and building trust. The role comes with significant challenges for executives accustomed to leading with metrics, as trust is much more of a woolly, complex emotion than a metric.

Particularly thanks to AI, “it is becoming harder to measure what’s real, what’s fake, and the trust boundaries are becoming more nebulous,” Lakshmi Hanspal, chief trust officer at the security company DigiCert, tells me. Cybersecurity is a defensive posture, and the chief information security officer (CISO), which has been a part of C-suites for 30 years, has often been a reactive role responsible for responding when there’s a cybersecurity threat or problem. CTrOs, as they’re commonly known, are meant to be more proactive. The CTrOs I spoke to for this story say a typical cybersecurity team and checking off compliance boxes is not always enough for a company to convince its customers it’s trustworthy anymore. A CTrO moves cybersecurity out of backrooms and into the business side of the company — that means their work is part technical, part communicative, and part innovative. They are tasked with safeguarding data, keeping companies compliant with regulations, ensuring ethical and accurate uses of AI, and communicating all of this to customers with the goal of becoming more transparent and trustworthy. “In an AI world, proof beats promise, and the CTrO owns the proof,” Hanspal says.

While businesses are more trusted than non-government organizations, the media, and government, according to a 2024 survey from public relations and marketing firm Edelman, overall trust is so low that they’re all in a race to the bottom. Four in 10 people from across the globe who responded to Edelman’s 2025 survey said they approve of “hostile activism,” like online attacks, damaging property, making threats of violence, or purposefully spreading misinformation, to bring about change. The public and business executives both want to have a trustworthy relationship, but they have completely different views on the current status of trust. In a 2024 survey from accounting firm PwC, 95% of business executives say organizations have an obligation to build trust, and 93% say trust is good for the bottom line. The clash: 90% of executives said their companies yield high trust from customers, but only 30% of customers actually have high levels of trust in companies.

Trust is a thorny concept that’s been entwined with the tech world since the 1990s. With more people plugging in their dial-up connections and the birth of user-generated content, being online meant more risk of scams, attacks, and misinformation, and companies had to focus on making their online experience palpable to people. At the same time, trust across institutions took a hit. More than half of American adults trusted the government following 9/11, according to an analysis from Pew Research Center, but that number quickly dropped and has stayed below 30% since 2007.

Then, the 2008 financial crisis usurped trust in business, and those suspicions were exacerbated into the 2010s as data breaches became common. Over the past decade, there’s been pressure, especially for B2B companies, financial institutions, and the other organizations that handle sensitive data, to build trust back. The CTrO is coming as a reaction to that pressure. “We have to build this trust quickly so that we can continue to use these products, innovate, move quickly, differentiate our services, differentiate our companies, and just compete,” says Chris Peake, chief trust officer at Gong, an AI revenue company. “It not only became just an important risk to think about protecting the company, it became very much almost a business necessity,” says Vinay Patel, software developer Zendesk as the company’s first chief trust and security officer, tells me. “Trust is really the pillar upon which we can build and grow our business.”

The chief trust officer is still a niche role. A recent report from Forrester Research looked at 16 chief trust officers and found their average tenure in the role to be just over 2 years. But companies are steadily announcing they have hired those with backgrounds in cybersecurity roles. That’s the profile Patel fits. He previously worked as a CISO, a role that also had its growth over the past few decades and is now commonplace. There’s “going to be a natural evolution” for the chief trust officer or some similar title, too, he says. As AI disrupts the workplace, CTrOs are needed to articulate what AI systems are built to do, and that they’re being built responsibility. “I can see that becoming more and more relevant,” he tells me, as customers will demand companies “have someone internally focused on ensuring that our trust isn’t eroded every single day.”

For trust officers, AI is a two-pronged problem. There’s nefarious actors using it for scams, but also skepticism that AI systems can be trusted to work ethically with sensitive data. The threat of deepfakes is one that sits outside of typical CISO work, which focuses on securing tech systems. The widespread adoption of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools like Midjourney, Dall-E, and video generators have made deepfakes easy and cheap over the past three years. Companies are facing not just cyber attacks to their infrastructure, but disinformation that can be spread about them online, and information attacks bolstered by AI, where people can impersonate company leadership. Ben Colman, CEO of deepfake detector company Reality Defender, says the CTrO or similar role can be someone who takes on conversations with regulators and publicly answers questions about security and safety. For some smaller companies, like Reality Defender, that means splitting up those functions across roles. But larger companies could increasingly hire a specific CTrO to wrangle them all. Colman says he views “anything to do to get people to take things like cybersecurity more seriously as a net positive.”

Widespread adoption of AI tools by businesses that handle sensitive data is one way to gauge how well trust-building is going, but the starkest way to measure your trustworthiness is whether your customers stick with you or jump ship. Whether CTrOs do rebuild trust or add value for companies remains to be seen — it could end up another flashy exec title that is a temporary bandaid to the bigger issue.

At the very least, the CTrO could be a way for companies to better communicate their goals and the tech that they’re using, which is a more people-first starting point for rebuilding trust. “We can’t separate the people from the businesses,” Peake says. “We’re really talking human to human — do I trust the people at an organization and, and do I trust them with my data?” There’s much work to be done to rebuild trust, Peake says, which, as the saying goes, is hard to earn and easy to lose. The CTrO’s job will be to try to earn that back, piece by piece. When it comes to trust, “we throw the word around a lot, but I think of it as a human emotion,” Peake says. “We know it because we feel it.”

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

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