The Trust Recession

Institutional trust is at a generational low — across government, media, science, healthcare, and the private sector. The collapse is not uniform, but the pressure is everywhere. Organizations that built their credibility on authority are discovering that authority no longer transfers automatically. And the AI era is accelerating the problem: synthetic content, information overload, and the erosion of shared reality are making credibility harder to establish and easier to destroy.

This talk maps the dynamics of the trust recession, what's driving it, and what organizations can actually do — not to "rebuild trust" through communications strategy, but to earn it through accountability, transparency, and demonstrated competence.

Who this is for

CEOs, communications leads, association executives, public institutions, healthcare organizations, financial services — any organization whose work depends on public credibility and that is finding that credibility harder to sustain.

Audience takeaways

• What's actually driving the trust collapse — and what's noise versus structural shift
• How trust works differently across institutions, sectors, and demographics
• What organizations that are gaining trust in this environment are doing differently
• The specific ways AI is making institutional credibility harder — and the specific ways it can help
• How to communicate under skepticism without appearing defensive or evasive

Sample titles

• The Trust Recession
• Earning Credibility in a Low-Trust World
• After Authority: Building Institutional Legitimacy When It's No Longer Assumed

Best formats

Keynote; fireside for communications and leadership audiences; workshop on institutional communication strategy.