AI Vitals: trust & connection in the AI age

  • Insights
  • AI

Earlier this month, we tuned into the wide-ranging conversations happening at OpenAI’s Dev Day 2025, which showcased rapid innovations in features & capabilities. From Apps built in ChatGPT and Agent Builder to Sora API and Codex updates. The tech ecosystem continues to evolve at pace, reshaping the future of digital engagement. Yet newly published Pew Research reveals growing public concern about how AI is impacting the world at a societal and cultural level. This shines the spotlight on connection and trust in the age of AI.

What does this mean for your business today?

Nurture your brand’s trust markers

  • As awareness grows alongside adoption, so does concern about AI transformative effects. Trust becomes the essential bridge between customers and your brand. While moving forward to test and experiment with AI pilots is critical to future success, you must first map your existing trust markers across your digital ecosystem. How will AI-driven changes reinforce or undermine the credibility customers already place in your brands? Trust cannot be retrofitted. It needs to be embedded from the start.

Own your moments of connection

  • OpenAI's recent launch of "Instant Check-Out" enables single item purchases directly within ChatGPT, ChatGPT Pulse proactively researches and delivers personalised updates based on your conversations, feedback, and connected apps like your calendar. Users curate what ChatGPT research, receiving topical visual cards each morning. Customers are increasingly capable of completing entire functional journeys without touching your brand's ecosystem. But Pulse goes further by moving from functional utility to hyper-personalisation co-created with the user.

  • Your moments of connection are undergoing a fundamental shift. Rethink personalisation as co-creation with your customers to understand where connection still matters. Integrate voice of the customer early in experience and product development. The brands that will maintain connection are those that empower customers as active participants in shaping their experiences, not passive recipients of outputs.

Ready to audit your trust markers? Let's talk strategy