The Future Isn't AI. It's Trust.
Adam O'Connor, Founder, Optimal Nexus
Four months ago I thought I’d be writing about AI. Instead I found myself watching missiles over the Middle East, changing jobs, building software until two in the morning and trying to work out what leadership actually means when everything seems to be changing at once. Oddly enough, none of that convinced me the future belongs to AI. It convinced me the future belongs to trust.
That’s the thread I keep pulling on. After four months away from writing, I don’t think the world needs another article telling us that AI is going to change everything. We already know that. The more interesting question, the one I keep coming back to, is whether we will change with it. And I don’t mean technologically, I mean personally. Because every meaningful conversation I’ve had recently eventually lands in the same place, and it isn’t cybersecurity, compliance or the latest model. It’s trust. Trust between people, trust between customers and companies, trust between leaders and their teams, and trust in the decisions organisations make every single day.
I took on a new role leading sales at Conectys during those four months, and became far more immersed in the world of Trust and Safety than I’d ever expected to be. Away from the day job I’ve also spent countless evenings building a software platform, ONX, that has become a fascinating experiment in decision making. The more we build it, the more convinced I become that technology should explain decisions, not replace them. There’s a real difference between a system that hands you an answer and one that shows you why, and the second is far harder to build and far more useful to trust. Some of my clearest thinking has come at one in the morning, staring at a screen, trying to work out how to make a machine account for itself the way we’d expect a person to.
When I first entered outsourcing, the industry was obsessed with efficiency. Cost, headcount, utilisation, margins and service levels were the whole conversation, and everything else was noise. None of that has disappeared and all of it still matters, but I genuinely believe we’re entering a different era. I increasingly describe what we do as Business Transformation Outsourcing rather than Business Process Outsourcing, and that isn’t marketing language, it’s a different philosophy. Customers aren’t simply asking providers to execute work anymore. They’re asking partners to help redesign how the work happens in the first place, and that demands different conversations, different skills, different leadership and different technology. The organisations that thrive over the next decade won’t necessarily be the ones with the lowest cost base. They’ll be the ones that combine operational excellence with intelligence, governance and trust, and that’s a very different proposition to the one I grew up with.
One of the reasons I’m genuinely excited about my role at Conectys is that the business has been investing in exactly these conversations, whether that’s Trust and Safety, digital operations, governance, or helping global organisations navigate environments that grow more complex by the month. Later this month I’ll be attending TrustCon in San Francisco, and I’m looking forward to it, though not because of the technology. It’s because of the people. Whenever an industry goes through a major transition, the best conversations rarely happen on stage. They happen over coffee, between sessions, and on the walk back from dinner, listening to practitioners compare notes on what’s actually working and what quietly isn’t. The questions everyone is wrestling with aren’t really technical anyway. They’re human. How do we use this responsibly, how do we protect people, how do we build systems people actually trust, and how do we move quickly without quietly compromising our ethics along the way. Those questions don’t have easy answers, and that’s precisely why events like this matter.
Trust and Safety has a way of putting all of this into sharp focus. The people who do this work spend their days making judgement calls that no rulebook fully covers, weighing context, intent and harm in situations where reasonable people would disagree. A model can flag a piece of content in milliseconds, and it should, because no human could ever keep pace with the volume. But deciding what to actually do about the hard cases, the ones sitting right on the line, still comes down to a person with experience and a conscience. Spend an afternoon with a team like that and any fantasy about technology quietly replacing human judgement falls apart pretty quickly. What you see instead is people and machines each doing the part they’re built for.
Something I’ve become far more convinced of is that leadership is becoming less about having the answers and more about asking better questions. For years we celebrated decisive, confident, visionary leaders, and those qualities still count for a great deal. But certainty has quietly become dangerous, because technology, regulation and markets are all evolving faster than any one person can keep pace with. The leaders I admire most today are the ones who are comfortable saying “I don’t know yet,” not because they’re weak but because they’re curious. Curiosity creates learning, learning creates better decisions, and better decisions create better organisations. It’s a simple chain, but it holds up under pressure, which is the only test that counts.
I’ve always believed in servant leadership, and I know some people misunderstand the phrase. They hear the word servant and assume it means being nice, avoiding hard conversations and trying to keep everyone happy. It means none of those things. Servant leadership isn’t about making life comfortable, it’s about making other people successful, and sometimes that means coaching, sometimes it means challenging, sometimes it means protecting your team from unnecessary noise, and sometimes it means delivering the difficult feedback that nobody else is prepared to give. The leader serves the mission by serving the people, not the other way around. I’ve worked for leaders who wanted followers and I’ve worked for leaders who wanted more leaders, and the difference is remarkable. One creates dependency and the other creates capability, and I know exactly which kind I’m still trying to become. My children are a constant reminder of this at home, because family has a way of showing you very quickly whether you actually lead by serving or just talk about it. You help, you’re honest, and you show up consistently, and it turns out that isn’t a bad description of leading grown adults either.
This is the part I’m most genuinely excited about. There’s a tired framing that pits people against machines, as if the story of the next decade is a straight contest and one side has to lose. I don’t buy it. The far more interesting truth, and the one I see playing out in real operations every week, is that the combination of the two is stronger than either on its own. Not people or technology, but people and technology, working together in a way that plays to the strengths of each. A machine can read a million interactions before I’ve finished my first coffee. It can surface a pattern buried so deep that no human would ever stumble on it, draft a first version in seconds, and take the repetitive weight off a team that used to drown in it. What it can’t do is sit across from an anxious customer and read the thing they aren’t saying. It can’t feel the room change. It can’t carry the weight of a decision that affects someone’s livelihood, and it can’t be accountable when there’s no perfect answer and a choice still has to be made.
That’s the partnership I find genuinely exciting. When you let the technology do what it’s brilliant at, you don’t diminish the people, you free them. You take the analyst who spent their week copying data between systems and you give them back the hours to think, to spot the thing the model missed, to have the conversation that changes a client relationship. The best outcomes I’ve seen aren’t the fully automated ones and they aren’t the stubbornly manual ones either. They’re the ones where a sharp human judgement sits on top of a fast, tireless engine underneath. The machine widens the field of what’s possible and the person decides what actually matters. Together they consistently outperform either working alone, and I don’t think that’s a temporary state of affairs while the technology catches up. I think it’s the whole point. The goal was never to remove people from the equation. It was to give good people better tools and then get out of their way.
That’s also why I think it will expose poor judgement more quickly rather than replace judgement altogether. When the analysis is fast and cheap and available to everyone, the differentiator stops being who has the information and becomes who knows what to do with it. When a difficult commercial decision has to be made, when someone’s career is affected, when a customer relationship is at risk and there simply isn’t a clean answer, leadership still matters, and arguably it matters more than it ever has. The tools raise the floor for everyone, which means the ceiling is set entirely by the quality of the people using them.
The one thing I hope we don’t lose over the next decade is our humanity, because every business transformation ultimately affects people. Every automation changes someone’s job and every operational improvement changes someone’s day, and that’s worth keeping firmly in view. Efficiency matters, profit matters and innovation matters, but people matter more, and any transformation that forgets that tends to unravel eventually, usually at the worst possible moment.
The conversations around GDPR and the EU AI Act are interesting for exactly this reason. Some organisations see regulation as something to survive and others see it as pure bureaucracy, but I’ve come to see it differently. I see an opportunity, because trust is quietly becoming a competitive advantage. Customers increasingly want to understand how their data is handled, employees want to know how these tools affect them, and boards want confidence that new technologies are being governed properly. The companies that embrace transparency won’t just stay compliant, they’ll become easier to buy from, and in a crowded market that is worth a great deal more than most people realise.
Sales is changing too, and I’ve written before about cold outreach. I still receive automated messages every day from people who clearly know nothing about me, and to my mind they’ve automated the wrong thing entirely. Technology should remove repetitive work, not remove empathy. I had a call recently with a prospect that was supposed to run twenty minutes, and we spent the first fifteen not talking about my business at all, just about the problem keeping them awake at night. By the time we got to what we actually do, they were asking questions rather than watching the clock. No sequence of automated touches would ever have got us there. The best salespeople I’ve ever met were never the best presenters, they were the best listeners. They understood context, they asked thoughtful questions, and they earned trust before they ever asked for commitment. That skill will never become obsolete, no matter how sophisticated the tools around it become, and if anything the flood of lazy automation makes a genuinely human approach stand out more than it ever did.
The last four months have reminded me of something I probably already knew, which is that progress rarely feels dramatic while you’re living through it. It usually feels messy, slow and frustrating, and you question yourself and wonder whether anyone even notices. Then one day you look back and realise how much has actually changed. I suspect the same is true of organisations. Transformation is almost never one giant breakthrough. It’s hundreds of small decisions made consistently over time, which is far less exciting to talk about but far closer to the truth of how anything real gets built.
So as I get ready to head to San Francisco, I’m looking forward to listening more than talking, to meeting old friends and making new ones, and to learning from people who spend every day solving genuinely hard problems. I expect I’ll come back with more questions than answers, and after the last four months I’ve made my peace with that. It’s usually a good sign.
Here’s where I’ve landed after all of it. I don’t think history will remember the organisations that adopted AI first. I think it will remember the ones that learned how to combine technology with trust. That’s a much harder problem. It’s also a far more interesting one. And if we get it right, we won’t just build better businesses. We’ll build better places for people to work.
Thank you for reading. It’s good to be writing again, and I hope this is the start of a much more regular conversation, because the best ideas rarely come from one person. They usually emerge from good ones.
One question I’d leave you with. What’s one thing you’ve changed your mind about in the last twelve months? I’d genuinely love to hear it.