There’s a Billy Joel song that’s been stuck in my head lately.
It’s called “A Matter of Trust,” and while it wasn’t written about technology, it might as well have been. Because more and more, I find myself thinking about how central trust has become to the future of innovation.
Not just whether something works — but whether people believe it will work. Whether it will treat them fairly. Whether it deserves a place in our lives.
When I board a plane, I think about the design decisions I didn’t make but have to trust. When I’m in a hospital, I wonder who’s reading my health data — and whether they’re using it to help me, or to profit from me. These are moments that hinge on invisible trust.
Public trust in technology is falling — even as our dependence on it grows. A 2024 Gallup study found that most Americans don’t trust businesses to use AI responsibly, reflecting a broader unease with data privacy, misinformation, and job displacement. In this environment, trust isn’t just a differentiator — it’s a prerequisite for adoption.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about what it means to build with trust in mind — and what responsibility really looks like in practice. Because “responsible innovation” is one of those phrases that’s easy to nod along with, but harder to pin down.
Some define it in terms of ethics and fairness. Others focus on human-centricity — promoting human well-being and accessibility. Still others emphasize environmental sustainability and accountability.
All of these matter. And yet I think what people are really asking, underneath it all, is something far simpler:
Can I trust this?
To me, earning and sustaining trust means meeting a higher bar across five areas. These are the questions I keep coming back to — whether I’m evaluating a product, advising a team, or envisioning the future:
- Will it work when it matters most? Is it reliable and safe — at scale, under stress, and over time?
- Is it secure and respectful of people’s data? Are protections baked in — not bolted on after the fact?
- Does it serve real people, not just the “average” default? Who benefits, and who might be left behind?
- Is it built with the long term in mind? What are the environmental and societal costs?
- Is it open about how it works, what it’s doing, and what could go wrong? Trust starts with transparency — long before anything breaks.
These aren’t technical specs or compliance boxes to check. They’re trust signals. They shape whether people adopt a solution — or reject it. Whether they recommend it — or walk away.
Even after a career spent building technology, I still find myself wondering whether it works for the people I care about most. When my son can’t access online learning because of a glitch, when my daughter gets lost in an unfamiliar city because the GPS loses signal, when our family’s data is part of a massive breach. I’m reminded: trust isn’t just about technology. It’s about people.
Crises make the stakes clear. In the Crisis Management in Tech course I teach at Yale and Cornell Tech, we’ve examined crises like the 2024 CrowdStrike IT outage, the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, the Boeing 737 MAX crashes, and the Theranos fraud scandal. These examples show how quickly trust can be broken — and how hard it is to rebuild.
The stakes are especially high when innovation has a social mission — when failure hurts the very communities it was designed to help. Society faces too many urgent challenges to squander innovation on solutions that break trust. Responsibility isn’t just about avoiding catastrophe. It’s about preserving the promise of innovation itself.
The cost of losing trust is steep. Companies that suffer a major data breach or ethics scandal often face long-term reputational damage, plummeting stock prices, and user abandonment. But beyond the business metrics, there’s a deeper cost: the erosion of public confidence in innovation itself.
Trust isn’t a feature. It’s the foundation.
And it’s not something you can buy, demand, or shortcut.
You earn trust — one decision, one design choice, one leadership moment at a time.
Photo by lauren lulu taylor on Unsplash
