Trust is a practice

Brand trust is earned by finding a real problem and solving it credibly, rather than telling people how trustworthy the brand is.

While leading corporate communications and citizenship at Samsung Electronics America, I listened to a teacher describe what she was afraid of when it came to AI. It wasn’t the technology itself. Instead, it was that her students would either avoid it out of fear or use it irresponsibly and without understanding it. What concerned her more was that she didn’t have the tools to teach them the difference. That conversation became the starting point for a specific piece of work within Samsung Solve for Tomorrow.

It was the moment when the programme shifted from just a student STEM competition to an initiative built specifically to help teachers and students approach AI and technology with confidence. It introduced practical resources and hands-on projects that directly addressed the problems the audience was facing. The programme didn’t start with “how do we get credit for caring about AI education?” It started with a real and specific fear that a teacher described, and we worked backward from there.

Most brand engagement still starts from the wrong question. What do we want to say? The more useful question, and the harder one, is: what problem are we solving?

That doesn’t only apply to social impact work. On the product side, the AI features now shipping in phones, TVs, and appliances promise to make daily life easier; however, easier is only credible if it’s also trustworthy. People don’t want AI that’s impressive in a demo. They want AI that respects their privacy and solves something real in their day rather than adding a feature nobody asked for. Communicating that responsibly means being honest about what the technology can and can’t do. It also means resisting the urge to oversell features in service of a bigger headline.

Whether you’re introducing a new AI feature to a consumer or a new AI curriculum to a classroom, the sniff test is the same – does this make someone’s life better or easier? Does it do so in a way they can verify for themselves? And very importantly, would they want to talk about it to others?

That’s a harder bar because it requires starting with genuine listening. It’s slower and rarely produces a clean announcement, but it can mean the difference between talking at your audience and talking with them.

The organisations that earn genuine trust over the next decade will be the ones asking what their audience needs right now.

That might mean an AI classroom programme that doesn’t scale to every school in the country in year one, because it’s built around what teachers asked for rather than what looks best in a press release. It might mean an AI feature that simply explains itself more clearly. Values aren’t a statement a brand makes about itself. They’re visible in the specific problems a brand chooses to solve, and how authentically it solves them.

That teacher’s classroom didn’t need Samsung to announce that it cared about the future of AI education. It needed tools and resources that worked, and that’s what earns trust.