If you've been around technology long enough, you know that "trust" used to be a marketing word. Now, it's a business risk category. Every week brings another headline about an AI system gone wrong, or a data partnership under fire. According to the Financial Times, some companies are even adding a new C-suite position—the Chief Trust Officer—to make sure their technology and data decisions hold up under scrutiny.
This new title demonstrates that trust is currency, and accountability is how that currency is earned-not simply checking the boxes on a compliance checklist or updating the company privacy policy. Specifically, businesses are being held accountable for how they build their systems, handle their data, and communicate with stakeholders.
And while we can't say that a C-suite position is the right answer for your organization, we can say a few things about those last three items.
Trust used to be an abstract value, but now there are some concrete ways to measure it: Uptime, data accuracy, transparency, explainability, auditability. When any one of those things is lacking, it's noticeable…and it creates a crisis in confidence.
At CSG, we've seen this happen across different industries:
Most of these times, the problem isn't that the technology was bad. It's more often an implantation problem and a culture problem. In short, the organization itself wasn't design with trust in mind to begin with, and so technology was never viewed through that lens.
The Chief Trust Officer, or CTrO, is a signal that businesses are finally treating trust like the asset it is. As Business Insider notes, the role is meant to blend security, data governance, ethics, and reputation management into one strategic function. It is meant to be a "connective tissue" role between technology, PR, and company culture.
One of the CTrO role's main tasks is to build frameworks for data transparency, AI accountability, and secure integration-the same building blocks that make analytics and software usable over the long term. And while most companies won't hire that title any time soon, they'll need someone to take ownership of those responsibilities, building trust in technology both internally and externally.
While a c-suite role for trust is a great signal to investors that a company takes these issues seriously, we wouldn't recommend to most businesses that they start there. In most cases, building trust in technology can start with how you scope and design your next project.
Start with discovery. When CSG leads a project, our first step isn't to map systems-it's to listen. We ask: Who will depend on this data? Who needs to trust these outcomes? Where could transparency fail? That kind of early alignment helps shape every decision that follows.
Next, architect for clarity. A "trust-first" tech stack is one where you can trace a number back to its source, see who has access, and know when it changed. That's where design decisions (metadata tagging, data lineage tracking, permission frameworks) matter as much as code.
Finally, measure adoption as a "trust signal." If users aren't engaging with your dashboards, and stakeholders keep exporting data to Excel, it's not just a training issue, it's a trust issue.
At CSG, we treat trust as something you can build into the architecture itself, right alongside scalability and performance. That means:
We like to think of it as the difference between compliance and confidence: Compliance meets a requirement, but it's confidence that earns adoption.
Generative AI has only made the need for "trust baked into design" more urgent. A recent MIT report found that roughly 95% of companies exploring AI aren't seeing meaningful ROI, often because they lacked true AI readiness—that is, trusted data foundations and clear data governance. Not surprising, when one considers that AI does not and cannot fix bad data or unaligned processes on its own-it merely amplifies them.
That's why, even in a world fascinated by what's new, the organizations winning with AI are often the ones that invested in the basics: Good governance, sound architecture, clarity, and trust.
If your team isn't ready to appoint a Chief Trust Officer, start by asking CTrO-style questions about every major tech decision:
You don't need a new title to answer those questions-you just need the right process and the right partner.
At CSG, we help organizations build the kind of data platforms, analytics systems, and custom software that people actually trust. Because when technology earns trust, adoption follows-and that's where transformation really begins.