The global trust landscape has shifted from a default state of “innocent until proven guilty” to one of permanent scepticism. According to Forrester’s latest research, trust in institutions and brands has eroded globally. Trust is no longer an assumed baseline but a currency that must be earned through action. As GenAI permeates daily life and deepfakes become a mainstream threat, organisations and brands face a critical crossroads.
Three pivotal trends define the trust and privacy sectors this year, says Forrester’s Global Government, Society, and Trust Survey 2025.
The first is the GenAI paradox, which reveals a fascinating contradiction in how consumers interact with AI. The survey reveals that only 14% of online adults in the US, UK, and Australia trust AI in high-stakes scenarios like self-driving cars.
However, Forrester predicts that by the end of 2026 30% of consumers will use GenAI tools for high-risk decisions involving personal finance and health care. This “trust gap” is being bridged through necessity and savvy risk management.
Consumers aren’t blindly trusting the tech; they are using it to bypass barriers of cost and accessibility. Users are increasingly “triangulating” results, using AI for initial research and then cross-referencing outputs with human professionals.
The second trend relates to deepfakes, which have evolved from a niche reputational risk into a direct tool for financial monetisation by bad actors. In response, Forrester predicts, spending on deepfake detection technology will surge by 40% in 2026.
Organisations are now deploying detection tools across diverse departments, including human resources and recruitment, customer support and financial services.
The threat is no longer theoretical. Organisations are now deploying detection tools across diverse departments, including human resources and recruitment, customer support and financial services.
The third trend is focused on consolidating privacy-preserving technologies (PPT). As AI adoption accelerates, the need to process data without exposing it has become a competitive differentiator. Forrester predicts at least five major acquisitions of PPT companies in 2026 as tech giants race to integrate advanced controls into their platforms.
The industry is moving beyond simple masking and tokenisation, with the focus shifting to “data-in-use” protection through homomorphic encryption (allowing computations on encrypted data without decrypting it first), synthetic data (creating mathematically accurate mirrors of real data sets to train AI without risking personally identifiable information) exposure and secure multiparty computation (enabling different parties to jointly compute a function over their inputs while keeping those inputs private).
Forrester says experimentation with GenAI must be paired with mitigation. Organisations that fail to invest in deepfake detection or advanced privacy technologies will find themselves on the wrong side of the trust divide.
To thrive, businesses must move away from “black box” AI implementations and toward transparent, verifiable systems that respect the consumer’s newfound scepticism.
The big take-out: Businesses must move away from “black box” AI implementations and toward transparent, verifiable systems that respect the consumer’s newfound scepticism.
