Three Decades of Trust

Exactly a decade ago, IE University Lifelong Learning offered me the chance to lead, as academic director, a program for top executives facing the challenge of redesigning their strategy in digital environments. The challenge was to confront a reality in which digital had already changed the rules of the game. At that moment, the dominant term was “digital transformation”.

Semantics is the territory of language's goldsmiths. Master silversmiths of the word who build promises on the basis of the challenges of each era. It is curious that talking about transformation is more necessary today than ever and yet we probably no longer call it that. We are beings who build reality through language. And as linguistic beings, we are also capricious.

At the time I decided that the best way to translate the challenge of transforming organizations in a new digital era was to reduce the feat to timeless concepts. I wanted to avoid any executive associating transformation with unintelligible neologisms. I chose a mathematical formula with a lyrical touch:

The function of digital transformation consisted—and still consists—of maximizing the value of an organization from people, data and technology, all of it raised to the power of trust. Value is determined by the board of directors—management board, board of trustees or governing council—which holds the fiduciary mandate of ownership. Maximizing means getting the best possible performance out of the available elements. And those catalyst elements were always the same: people, data and technology. But if trust turns negative—if the exponent falls below zero—the formula collapses.

Let's go back thirty years. In the second half of the nineties, the challenge was to accept that a new wave of communications would transform the world. Mobile phones were emerging and we were still torn between analog and digital. Email was starting to become institutionalized, Yahoo dominated the landscape and in Spain the first search engine bore the most quintessentially Spanish name possible: Olé. We were digital babies.

People accessing an immense network of content based on the "http" protocol, created a few years earlier by Tim Berners-Lee. Connecting required a terminal, a telephone line and ISDN services that would soon give way to ADSL. Technology enabling data, data connecting people. And it was our trust that allowed the leap from one era to the next. Google had not yet been born.

We entered the 2000s understanding that the web was a meeting place. The internet was opening a global conversation, as The Cluetrain Manifesto proclaimed: people were already speaking with a human voice, not a corporate one. Companies had to learn to take part in that conversation.

LinkedIn was born in 2002, Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006. People conversing through technology platforms that left a constant trail of personal data. Google, born at the end of 1998, set about organizing that ocean of information. Trust was at its peak. Users generated content and the hope of a better era seemed plausible.

The 2010s brought the smartphone and displaced the web as the dominant interface. Native applications and instant messaging distributed data at an unprecedented speed. The amount of information a person generated in a year came to be generated in a day. But not all of it was true. Without realizing it, we were sowing the next wave: big data expanding and trust eroded by post-truth. Despair sets in.

Then came a decentralized model based on blockchain, conceived by cypherpunks in the middle of the financial crisis. It promised to reconnect people, data and technology under a "protocol of truth". Another longing for hope. Speculation, however, diverted the promise. Trust suffered once again.

And then came the 2020s with a pandemic that accelerated digitalization like no other event in recent history. A shock that reminded us of uncertainty and, at the same time, drove the greatest digital adoption since the birth of the internet. Today, three out of every four people depend daily on that network to connect. People, data and technology keep combining to generate value. Only now we talk about "post-reality", and we find it hard to tell the human from the synthetic.

Ahead of us an economy based on autonomous AI agents is emerging. Systems capable of deciding on behalf of humans, orchestrated on technological infrastructures where data is the new oil. The challenge repeats itself, redesigning trust so that people, data and technology generate the value we decide to name as such. And not for some humans over others. There is only one kind of human.

This space of human-machine collaboration will be the ground where the next era of trust germinates. An era where AI lacks intention. Even if it writes, speaks, draws and generates videos like the most virtuoso of humans, it will always be a valuable ally for augmenting humans. This is the era of Augmented Intelligence (the new A.I.). Let's not blame AI for our decisions. Foolishness, like moral conscience, is an exclusively human prerogative. There is no consciousness in AI.

In this new era of agentic AI, the mandate must always be human. Let's not confuse personification or anthropomorphism with consciousness. Let's put humans first and keep them accountable in this new human-machine context, and let's define value and trust for the next 30 years. I, for one, still hold hope.

Perhaps, after all, these thirty years have not been about digital transformation, but about learning about trust. And the next thirty will depend on what we decide to raise the formula to.