Leadership: Trust in the Age of Agentic AI

Trust isn’t built in strategy decks.

In business, your word should mean everything, primarily when tough decisions affect livelihoods and people look to you for the truth, not a script. Integrity isn’t a marketing line; it’s the actual currency of leadership. And once it’s gone, it’s almost impossible to get back.

When leaders say one thing and do another, when issues get buried and politics wins over progress, you don’t just lose trust. You lose belief, culture, and the very thing that gives people the courage to go beyond their job description.

I've lived it, where the power of storytelling replaces facts.

In that kind of environment, integrity becomes inconvenient. And eventually, decisions aren’t discussed—they’re handed down. Quietly. Without process. Without truth.

That’s what happens when leadership fails and structure doesn’t exist to challenge it.

It doesn’t happen all at once. It happens slowly. Warnings are ignored. The same mistakes get rebranded as strategy. Culture becomes compliance. And by the time it all starts breaking down, the business might still survive in the market, but internally? It’s hollow.

Because the legacy of any organisation isn’t what it sells; it’s what its people say when they leave. And if good people leave with a bitter taste, they don’t just take their skills—they take the story with them.

We talk a lot about brand reputation in terms of customers.

But your internal brand, what your own people believe about you, is what really determines whether your culture scales or collapses. That’s the real reputational risk. And it’s not something you can fix with a campaign. It’s earned through consistent action, honesty, and structure that holds leadership accountable.

That’s why structure matters.

When it works, it gives teams the power to challenge, the space to lead, and the confidence that decisions are based on what’s right, not who’s in the room. When it fails, it reinforces the wrong voices, buries accountability, and pretends dysfunction is part of the plan. You can’t build trust inside an echo chamber.

And now, we’re entering a reality where the stakes are only getting higher. AI isn’t coming—it’s here.

Agentic AI is already handling workflows, customer support, product insights, scheduling, and content creation. It’s efficient. Impartial. Tireless.

And yes, there will come a time when AI runs operations from end to end. No egos. No hierarchy. Just clean, scalable logic.

Sounds impressive. But is that the future we actually want?

Picture a workplace where onboarding is AI-led, performance reviews are data-generated, and decisions are made by models trained on market variables instead of lived experience. Fast? Sure. But where’s the mentorship? The gut instinct? The space for failure, or the leader who sees potential where others see risk?

It doesn’t understand grey. It doesn’t wrestle with ethics. It doesn’t care about history, culture, or legacy. That’s still our job. And if leadership lacks integrity today, AI won’t fix that. It’ll just make it harder to see, faster to scale, and easier to hide behind.

This is the tension at the heart of Google’s latest AI vision

Personal, Proactive, and Powerful. It sounds compelling.

But without governance, structure, and trust built in at the human level, those three Ps risk becoming Performative, Presumptive, and Problematic.

Who’s accountable when AI makes a bad call?

What happens when trust is engineered out of the loop? The laws of work weren’t written for agent-led businesses. In the gaps, bad leadership will use that ambiguity as cover.

People will get hurt, not because of the tech, but because it was applied without integrity, governance, and a human compass.

But there is another way.

The best organisations won’t fear AI; they’ll partner with it. They’ll pair "radical transparency" with ethical frameworks. They’ll automate the noise so people can focus on what matters. They’ll keep the soul in the system and the truth in the culture. They’ll use AI to augment people, not erase them.

The truth is, we all feel the fear, the uncertainty, and the doubt.

That’s not weakness; it’s awareness. But this moment demands more from leaders, not less. It demands clarity. Conviction. And above all, honesty. Because in the end, the only thing more powerful than change is trust. And the only way to build it is to tell the truth.

• What are your thoughts on how leaders can best build trust in this new era?

• Have you experienced the impact of integrity- or its absence–firsthand?

I’d love to hear your perspective.