Rachel Botsman
"She kept our 2000 delegates on the edge of her seats for over an hour not only with the quality of her content but also with her humor and engaging speaking style." Non-Profit
Rachel Botsman is the leading thinker and author on trust in the modern world. By distilling complex ideas into clear and compelling content, she gives us the tools to understand trust – what it means, how it works and why it’s so important for every aspect of our lives.
Rachel Botsman is a trust expert, author and a lecturer at Oxford University. She is passionate about teaching people how to think differently and challenge ideas around trust, humility and integrity.
She has been recognized as one of the world’s 30 most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50, one of the Top 10 most influential voices in the UK on LinkedIn and honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
Botsman is the author of two critically acclaimed books that have been translated into 14 languages. Her first book, “What’s Mine is Yours”, predicted the rise of the ‘sharing economy’, and was hailed by TIME magazine as one of the “10 Ideas that Will Change the World.” Her second book, “Who Can You Trust?”, explores the profound ways trust is shifting in the world; it was praised by Adam Grant, Marc Benioff, Sherry Turkle, and was named one of the best books of the year by Wired.
She is a world-renowned speaker for her clear insights and warm storytelling. Past clients have included Salesforce, Goldman Sachs, the World Business Forum, Aspen Ideas Festival, Adobe, and Snapchat. Botsman is often voted the audience’s favorite speaker at events and her TED talks have been viewed more than five million times. She is also the host of the podcast series Trust Issues.
Botsman is a regular contributor to The Guardian, Financial Times, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review and Wired. Through her popular newsletter, Rethink, Botsman warmly engages with a community of over 35,000 subscribers every fortnight.
Botsman has lived and worked on four different continents, giving her a global perspective on the important issues of our times.
Rachel Botsman: In Technology We Trust?
Rachel Botsman: In Technology We Trust?
AI is rapidly reshaping how we make decisions, create, work, and even trust one another. But here’s the challenge: most of the questions about trust and AI are framed incorrectly. The real issue is not whether people should trust AI, but how we design AI systems to be genuinely trustworthy. Rachel uses her ‘Trust Shift’ framework to show how every major leap in history has required new forms of trust, and why AI marks a fundamentally different moment that forces us to rethink the rules altogether.
Participants will learn:
• Why the real question is not “should we trust AI?” but “when is it trustworthy?”
• The challenges and possibilities of shifting trust from people to intelligent systems
• How the AI Trust Matrix reveals where different systems stand on trustworthiness
• The four dimensions that determine whether an AI system earns or loses confidence.
Why do some innovations fail while others succeed? The difference is rarely the technology; it’s whether people trust it enough to make the leap. Every breakthrough depends on what Rachel calls a Trust Leap: the decision to embrace a new way of working, creating, or connecting. Yet too often, innovators obsess over features and functions and overlook the trust conditions that truly determine adoption. Drawing on 15 years of work with Fortune 500 companies and start-ups, Rachel shares her ‘Trust Leap’ framework, showing why designing for trust is as essential as designing for usability or beauty. Through stories that span from historical inventions to today’s disruptive start-ups, she reveals how trust is the hidden design layer that allows ideas to take root and grow.
Participants will learn:
• Why trust is the bridge that makes people willing to take risks on new ideas.
• The design principles that encourage people to make a ‘Trust Leap.’
• How to identify and close the trust gaps that quietly block adoption.
When the world feels complex and fast-moving, trust becomes a powerful source of clarity and confidence. It gives people the courage to take smart risks, collaborate across teams, and lean into change instead of resisting it. Yet despite how often we use the word, trust is still clouded by myths. In this keynote, Rachel deconstructs those misconceptions and invites audiences to rethink trust as something they can actively shape. With her ‘Risk–Trust Lens’ framework, she shows why the balance between risk and trust is the hallmark of adaptive leadership and shares practical tools leaders can use to build cultures where people feel safe, supported, and ready to step into the unknown.
Participants will learn:
• Why trust is the foundation of resilience in uncertain times.
• How to use the ‘Risk–Trust Lens’ to make smarter decisions under pressure.
• The four traits every leader must consistently demonstrate to earn trust.
• Why cultures built on trust consistently outperform those built on control
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