#14 The year trust won

This year didn’t just accelerate AI, it surfaced something far more foundational: the work of trust can’t wait.

2025 was the year organisations stopped assuming that speed alone would deliver value. 

Everywhere we went - from government departments navigating high-risk deployments, to global cities scaling AI-enabled services - we saw the same realisation: trust isn’t a brake. It’s the mechanism that keeps teams in control as systems scale.

Internally, we grew to meet that reality. We doubled our team, bringing in new skills because the complexity of AI demands breadth: technical depth, human-centred design, and organisational systems that make speed safe.

Across our work, the same practical approaches to responsible AI emerged. Confidence arose from practices that reveal limits early, create meaningful oversight, and give teams space to learn before consequences are high.

The organisations that made progress this year weren’t the ones experimenting fastest. They were the ones building feedback loops, strengthening accountability, and coordinating across teams.

For IF, 2025 was a year of clarity: that trust is the key to adoption.

And as we look to 2026, that clarity becomes a mandate: invest in capability, deepen judgement, and put trust at the centre of how AI is designed and deployed.

Find more insights from our reflections on 2025

For 10 years, IF has been helping large organisations build customer-facing services that scale safely, earn trust from the start and deliver long-term impact. We prototype, test, and launch AI products and services that people believe in and want to adopt, while helping organisations change the way they work in the AI age.

Learn more or talk to us.

What we’ve been reading

Great Expectations – Ada Lovelace Institute

A sharp briefing on why the “AI dividend” is unlikely to arrive without rethinking the fundamentals of how AI is governed and deployed. It’s a useful counterweight to the hype: a reminder that public expectations are rising faster than institutions’ ability to deliver. It resonates with our work helping organisations build real capability, not just rhetoric.

Uber wants to turn your journeys into ad-targeting gold

Uber Ads has launched new “intelligence insights”, using trip and takeout data to help marketers target people based on where they go and what they do. It’s a live example of the expanding surface area for data use, and a reminder that trust is shaped by the unexpected ways that services repurpose behavioural data.

Cloudflare on the ‘dramatic shift’ caused by AI scraping

Cloudflare says it blocked 416 billion scraping attempts in five months, mostly from AI bots vacuuming up content. Its CEO warns that the business model of the open web is under real pressure. Scraping at this scale is reshaping incentives for publishers, creators, and platforms. It’s also accelerating conversations about provenance, consent, and the future economics of information.

Final thought

As we head towards the end of the year, we all wish you a peaceful and restorative festive break.

Whether you’re spending it with family, friends, or taking much-needed time for yourself, I hope you find space to fully switch off.

See you in the new year - recharged, ready, and with plenty of room for good ideas.

Thanks for reading and sticking with us this year.

Until next time,

— Sarah and the IF Team

Find us on LinkedIn and Medium for more insights and updates.