Trust has always influenced commercial relationships, but the digital economy has transformed it into something more immediate and fragile. Every request for personal information, automated recommendation and AI-assisted conversation now asks customers to make a judgement: does this organisation deserve access to my data?

Their answer increasingly affects where they spend. Cisco’s 2024 Consumer Privacy Survey found that 75% of consumers would not purchase from an organisation they did not trust with their data. Among people aged 25–34, 49% had switched companies or providers because of data policies or sharing practices.

This is turning privacy from a regulatory concern into a customer experience discipline. A technically compliant privacy notice is no longer enough if customers cannot understand it, control their preferences or see the value they receive in return for sharing information.

“Trust is no longer a ‘soft’ metric – it is a revenue lever,” says Martin Hartley, Chief Commercial Officer at emagine. He argues that companies must stop treating privacy as “a legal checkbox owned by risk teams” and begin treating it as a product and customer experience decision shared by legal, product and customer-facing teams.

Martin Hartley, Chief Commercial Officer at emagine.

The emerging trust economy rewards organisations that can use customer information intelligently without making people feel watched or manipulated. It also punishes those that allow enthusiasm for personalisation and AI to outpace governance.

Privacy Moves Into the Customer Journey

For many enterprises, privacy remains largely invisible until a customer encounters a consent banner, reads a privacy policy or suffers the consequences of a breach. That approach overlooks the accumulation of smaller signals that shapes confidence throughout the customer journey.

Customers notice whether permission requests are intelligible, whether opting out is straightforward and whether their preferences follow them from one channel to another. They also notice when an organisation appears to know more about them than the relationship reasonably requires.

Salesforce research suggests 71% of customers are more likely to trust a company with their data if its use is clearly explained. Yet 51% believe most companies do not use their personal information in ways that benefit them. The problem, therefore, is not necessarily data collection itself, but an unclear or unequal value exchange.

Romain Gauthier, Founder and CEO at Didomi, says businesses must stop seeing privacy as a legal obligation and recognise it as a strategic asset embedded in product design, marketing and customer engagement. “This also requires a shift away from collecting as much data as possible, which leads to the risk of ‘dead-end data’ which is information that adds risk, no value or additional complexity without delivering meaningful value for customers or the business,” he told Silicon UK.

Romain Gauthier, Founder and CEO, Didomi.

Data minimisation can consequently improve both privacy and operational performance. Information that has no defined purpose increases storage, security and compliance burdens while contributing little to customer understanding. Collecting the right information, with informed consent and a clear purpose, produces a cleaner foundation for personalisation and analytics.

The practical challenge is consistency. Consent recorded on a website must also be respected by email marketing, contact centres, mobile applications, printed communications and AI systems. Fragmented customer records can make even a well-intentioned organisation appear untrustworthy.

Allan Christian, SVP and General Manager of the Engage business unit at Precisely, emphasised that customers expect their privacy preferences to be honoured across every channel. A unified approach ensures “the same rules, consents and governance policies are applied uniformly across all opted-in channels”, rather than leaving preferences in silos where gaps emerge.

Personalisation Must Become a Transparent Exchange

The apparent conflict between privacy and personalisation is often overstated. Customers are not necessarily opposed to companies using their information. They object when its collection is concealed, its use is unexpected or the benefit flows entirely to the business.

The difference is visible in everyday services. A banking customer may welcome analysis that identifies fraudulent transactions or forgotten subscriptions. A retailer might use purchase history to prevent irrelevant offers. In each case, the data use has an understandable purpose and produces an identifiable benefit.

Problems arise when personalisation becomes surveillance: when an organisation combines data from multiple sources without making that process apparent, makes sensitive inferences or creates the sense that the customer cannot escape profiling.

Maksim Evdokimov, Chief Product, Marketing and CX Officer at Bir, commented that the company explains why personal information is needed, how it will be used and how customers can revoke access. “I firmly believe that clearly stated intentions raise data literacy and build trust between an enterprise and consumers,” he says.

Maksim Evdokimov, Chief Product, Marketing and CX Officer, Bir.

Control should therefore be continuous, rather than reduced to a one-off consent decision. Customers need accessible preference centres and the ability to change their minds without facing artificial friction. Organisations should also test whether explanations are genuinely comprehensible, rather than merely legally defensible.

“We must move away from producing 40-page policies that are customer unfriendly – let’s be honest, nobody reads them,” Hartley told Silicon UK. “If a disclosure needs a lawyer to parse, it’s compliance theatre, not transparency.”

Effective transparency does not mean revealing every technical detail. It means answering the questions that matter: what information is being collected, why it is needed, what benefit it enables, who can access it and what control the customer retains.

AI Raises The Price Of Opacity

Artificial intelligence makes this work more urgent because it expands the scale and apparent autonomy of data-driven decisions. Recommendations, prices, eligibility decisions and service responses can now be shaped by systems customers neither see nor understand.

Adoption should not be confused with confidence. A 2025 global study from the University of Melbourne and KPMG found that 66% of people regularly use AI, but only 46% are willing to trust AI systems. Meanwhile, Salesforce found that only 42% of customers trust businesses to use AI ethically, down from 58% in 2023.

Enterprises should disclose AI involvement when it materially affects an interaction or outcome. Salesforce also reports that 72% of customers consider it important to know when they are communicating with an AI agent. Labelling an automated assistant is a start, but meaningful transparency must extend further when AI influences pricing, financial decisions, product recommendations or access to services.

“Customers don’t necessarily need an explanation of every algorithm, but they do expect accountability,” says Derek Slager, co-founder and co-CEO of Amperity. Organisations should be transparent when AI meaningfully shapes an interaction, he explained, while maintaining the data lineage, governance and human oversight needed to explain decisions internally.

Derek Slager, co-founder and co-CEO, Amperity.

That distinction is important. Disclosure without accountability can become another superficial notice. Enterprises need escalation routes through which customers can reach a person or correct inaccurate information. They also need to know which data informed a decision and who remains responsible for it.

AI governance and customer experience can no longer operate as separate programmes. If poorly governed customer data enters an AI system, automation can reproduce errors and create bias across thousands of interactions. As Slager emphasised, AI built on fragmented or inaccurate customer context merely scales the underlying problems.

Trust Becomes an Enterprise Capability

Trust is built at the interface but created across the organisation. Marketing cannot promise transparency if technology teams cannot trace data. Customer service cannot honour a deletion request if information remains duplicated across disconnected systems. A responsible AI policy means little if procurement introduces ungoverned third-party models.

Enterprises therefore need shared ownership extending across the board: privacy, security, data, technology, legal, marketing and CX functions. Useful measures include consent withdrawal, preference-centre use, complaints, disputed AI outcomes, data-correction requests and churn following privacy incidents. These indicators can reveal where stated principles diverge from lived experience.

The commercial case is becoming clearer. Cisco’s 2025 Data Privacy Benchmark Study found that 79% of organisations experienced significant improvements in customer loyalty and trust from privacy investment, while 78% said such investment made their company more attractive to the public.

Failures remain expensive. IBM placed the global average cost of a data breach at $4.44 million in 2025, including lost business, lost customers and reputational damage. Yet the response can be as important as the initial incident. Speed, honesty, accountability and visible corrective action help determine whether confidence can be restored.

“Customers are generally willing to forgive honest mistakes,” Slager commented. “They’re much less willing to forgive a lack of transparency or accountability.”

The next competitive divide will not simply separate businesses with advanced AI from those without it. It will separate enterprises able to make sophisticated technology feel understandable and accountable from those that ask customers to accept it on faith.

Trust is not a statement in a privacy policy. It is the cumulative result of every permission requested, every choice respected, every automated decision explained, and every failure acknowledged.

Enterprises that design those moments deliberately will gain more than compliance. They will earn the confidence that makes lasting customer relationships possible.