Designing trust for the AI era

Something has shifted. A generation that came of age with the internet isn’t turning to banks for financial guidance, they’re turning to social media influencers. According to one survey, 75% of people get their financial advice from TikTok or similar platforms. That’s not a communication problem. It’s a trust problem.

This was the provocation that opened a conversation between our Global CEO Sairah Ashman and Lloyds Banking Group CMO Suresh Balaji at SXSW London in early June. But the bigger question underneath it – the one that shapes how we work with every brand we touch – is this: what does trust actually mean now and how do you design for it?

How trust has changed

At Wolff Olins, we talk a lot about the gap between institutional trust and cultural trust. A brand can have one and be completely invisible to the other. That gap is exactly where design lives and where the most interesting work happens.

Lloyds Banking Group ran large-scale quantitative research to understand this shift and found that trust has three distinct dimensions: character (does this organisation do the right thing?), competence (will they actually deliver?) and credibility (do people I relate to vouch for them?).

Back in the day, most brands leaned heavily on trust in character. But the world has moved on. The rise of social media has created a new trust currency – credibility not from authoritative sources, but from any source. That’s why a “FinTok” influencer can carry more weight with a 22-year-old than a 330-year-old bank. Brands that only lean on heritage, without earning credibility or demonstrating real competence, have a problem.

And here’s the thing most brands miss: trust rarely collapses in a single, obvious moment. It erodes quietly. You’re not there when you’re needed. Your tone feels slightly off. Your people can’t quite deliver. The small things accumulate, and your customers have already left before you’ve noticed they were leaving.

From identity to infrastructure

One of the most significant shifts we’ve made at Wolff Olins – and one we brought directly to our work with Lloyds – is thinking about brand as infrastructure, and building it that way.

For a 330-year-old brand with over 25 million customers and thousands of engineers, that distinction matters enormously. The brand operating system we built with Lloyds connects directly into Figma, AI tools and Canva, putting the brand in the hands of the people actually building the product, not just the marketing team. What a brand stands for and how it actually shows up are no longer two separate conversations and the system is built to keep it that way, however fast the world and technology move.

New era, new roles

This infrastructure is creating a new kind of role. One of the fastest-growing job families right now isn’t in marketing or tech – it’s conversation designers. People who shape what an algorithm says when a customer needs help. Because these interactions don’t happen on their own. They have to be designed. And designed honestly.

How do you encode a brand’s values into the moments where humans aren’t in the room? It requires clarity of philosophy first and then the infrastructure to carry it through.

What nostalgia can’t do

Every legacy brand lives with a version of the same question: what to keep, what to retire, what to reinvent. Suresh oversees a portfolio of 16 brands and sits with this constantly. His conclusion is one we share: nostalgia is a powerful asset, but it can’t be your strategy.

There’s a difference between a brand that reinvents itself and one that redecorates.

The brands doing this well right now – the ones that feel both solid and alive – have understood that trust is cultural as much as it is institutional. They’re not waiting for customers to come to them with respect. They’re earning relevance, daily, through every designed moment of the experience.

That’s the work. Behave it, design it, mean it.

Designing Trust: How Legacy Brands Win in an Age of AI, Anxiety and Algorithmic Culture was presented by Sairah Ashman, Global CEO at Wolff Olins and Suresh Balaji, CMO at Lloyds Banking Group, at SXSW London 2026.