AI has a digital trust problem.The more we use AI, the less we trust it. AI is approaching a crisis in trust not because people fail to understand how to use technology, but because they don’t believe it is working in their favour or supporting their expectations and values. As we learn more about people’s use of AI and their sentiments around it, it becomes ever clearer that this isn’t a problem with the technology, it’s a problem with how companies are deploying it.

The US is one of the leaders in both AI development and AI skepticism. Here, a Quinnipiac University poll published in March 2026 found that of nearly 1,400 Americans surveyed, more than three-quarters (76% of respondents) said they trust AI rarely or only sometimes, compared to just 21% who trust it most or almost all the time. A June 2025 Pew Research survey found that half of U.S. adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited.

Even young people, who are typically the first to embrace new technologies, are notably pessimistic. Teenagers and young adults reportfeeling far angrier and more anxious about AI than they feel hopeful or excited, with reports of anger about AI increasing significantly in just the past year. For individualsbroadly, fear of job displacement and of algorithmic bias producing unfair results, in everything from employment decisions to criminal sentencing, drives their mistrust. For businesses, a noted lack of return on investment and concerns about AI hallucinations eat away at enthusiasm for the technology.

AI is certainly a fraught issue in the US, but the trust crisis is global. While most people agree that regulation would help to avoid the negative impacts of AI, the Stanford 2026 AI Index reports that only a bare majority (54%) globally. Far fewer people in leading economies trust their own governments to regulate AI (40% in Canada, 39% in Great Britain and in last place 31% in the United States). If people believe that there must be some rules around AI deployment, but they don’t trust governments to put the appropriate regulation in place, it will be up to businesses – those designing and deploying AI – to step up to halt and reverse this slide into mistrust.

The way businesses earn trust in AI is through technology governance.

What is Technology Governance?

Technology governance is the systematic process through which business keep the promises they make about new technologies. These include the promises they make to their shareholders around reliability and profitability. Technology governance also helps businesses meet the expectations of the society in which they operate and helps create a more durable, long-term strategy for future growth.

In a basic sense, governance of any kind is about making decisions that are defensible and likely to lead to desired goals (about defining what those goals are in the first place). There are many layers of governance, from global governance (the UN, international agencies and treaties), regulations nations use to ensure businesses exercise appropriate oversight, corporate governance that guides business decisions and goals and even internal or technology-specific governance.

While technology governance does happen globally, between nations and within nations, the choices made by companies about AI and other technologies do the most to build trust right now. Steering our innovation journey and making choices about which technologies get built, deployed and used are all human decisions and lie at the heart of good governance. That’s why, in this case, I’ll mainly refer to corporate governance, the rules, processes and practices we put in place to ensure businesses are adequately controlled, directed and held accountable to their stakeholders.

For technology governance, the concept of digital trust helps to frame the decisions businesses need to make and define acceptable goals when they develop or deploy technology. Within a technology governance program, earning trust must be one of the major goals for any company. From a purely financial perspective, a digital trust approach helps save money: by defining and adhering to clear values around technology, it helps ensure that companies don’t chase market narratives at the expense of business and social realities and it helps decision-makers cut through hype to focus on what matters most.

Building and deploying trustworthy technology requires understanding a foundational truth: trustworthy technology is well-governed technology. In the long run, it is not enough that technology works and it is not enough that it initially generates revenue. Technology governance, based on the development of digital trust, is a key business function in an era where trust fundamentally matters.  Digital trust-based technology governance programs must recognize two parts: trustworthy goals and the means to attain those goals. The goals of a company that gets technology governance right will be shaped by what it takes to ensure that the technologies businesses develop and deploy will be secure, reliable, safe and predictable. These technologies will also be supported with strong oversight mechanisms and be aimed at responsible uses. Those qualities do not emerge automatically; they happen because we decide to make them happen through disciplined governance.

Technology governance programs, in order to be effective, must also address the means of getting to those goals. In my digital trust framework, I identify 9 factors for digital trust: Transparency, Cybersecurity, Interoperatibility, Auditability, Redressability, Privacy, Safety, Sustainability and Fairness. These factors are both relational (relevant to the interactions between a business and its customers, partners, shareholders and others) and mechanical (relevant to the functioning of the technologies a business uses). Taken together they cover the breadth of decisions that a company using technology must get right to maintain long-term viability and earn digital trust.

How Technology Governance Helps Earn Trust in AI

So, what does it actually look like to govern AI in a way that earns trust? The goals of security, reliability, accountability and responsibility are important touchstones for AI deployment, just as they are for other technologies. While these goals exist across all the factors of digital trust, here I’ll share a preview of how a trustworthy technology governance program might look at them.

Security and reliability will form the foundation for well-governed, trust-earning AI. Users and businesses can only trust AI systems that perform as intended, protect the data they are given and resist attack or manipulation. This requires genuine investment in cybersecurity as a strategic commitment. It also means building AI systems to reliable, well-defined parameters and being honest about their limitations. AI systems that hallucinate, that fail silently or that can be manipulated into producing harmful outputs are significant trust problems and need to be treated as such. Good governance requires that businesses set explicit standards for system reliability and treat security and safety as inseparable from the AI development/deployment process itself.

Accountability and oversight address the question of what happens when things go wrong. Things will inevitably go wrong and it’s better to have a plan than be surprised. AI systems can produce biased outputs, amplify misinformation or take autonomous actions with serious consequences. Earning trust requires that responsibilities for these outcomes are clearly assigned, that mechanisms for auditing performance are in place and that individuals harmed by AI have a genuine avenue for redress. Transparency – both in terms of how an AI system is working and how the business plans to use – makes accountability possible. Auditability, including regular third-party review, makes it credible. And redressability, the capacity to correct harm when it occurs, makes accountability real.

Ethics and responsible use are where governance most directly confronts the social consequences of AI and where the deepest digital trust problems reside. Fairness demands that AI systems be designed with awareness of how they can perpetuate historical biases and that outputs be monitored for disparate impacts on different groups. Privacy requires that individuals retain meaningful control over their personal data. Safety means actively working to prevent AI from producing harmful outputs (like dangerous misinformation or psychologically damaging content). And interoperability, though it may sound technical, is fundamentally about preventing the concentration of power: open, standards-based AI systems ensure that no single vendor’s choices lock businesses or individuals into systems they cannot audit, migrate away from or hold accountable.

These factors are not independent checkboxes and every business will have to integrate them based on their own technology goals, values and strategy. They work together and they require leadership to drive them. Earning digital trust from AI requires committing to all these dimensions together and that commitment has to come from the top. With the right leadership, technology governance can bring both trust and optimism back to AI. After all, innovation and governance represent two aspects of our optimism. Companies using AI have focused almost solely on one side of that equation: innovation. When pursued at all costs, that’s led to AI’s digital trust crisis. So far, many companies have failed to recognize that, without also attending to governance, optimism cannot flourish and the opportunity AI promises will be squandered.

Right now, people want an optimistic future from AI. People are also demanding AI that helps them and doesn’t harm them. At least in the short term, regulation is not likely to give businesses clarity on how to do that. But a pause in regulation is not a holiday from responsibility. Business leaders who see that fact and take the lead in trustworthy technology governance stand have an unprecedented opportunity to grow while earning trust. This is true now for AI and will be true for quantum, advanced nuclear, biomedical and other technologies in the future. With effective technology governance, the companies that win in the 21st century will be the ones that earn trust in innovation.

Save 30% on Technology Governance  with code ABS30.