Rachel Botsman
Trust inside organisations is being tested faster than leaders can rebuild it. Restructuring, hybrid working, and the arrival of AI tools have stripped the assumptions that used to hold teams together. The result is a workforce that complies but does not commit, and decisions that get slower precisely when they need to be quicker.
Rachel Botsman is the Oxford Saïd trust fellow whose work helps leaders rebuild confidence, accountability, and decision speed in organisations reshaped by change and AI.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Rachel Botsman
- She has built a discrete intellectual territory around trust, with three named frameworks (Trust Leap, Trust Shift, Risk–Trust Lens) that give leadership teams a working vocabulary rather than a motivational concept.
- She holds the first Trust Fellowship at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, a position created around the subject she defined. Few speakers in this category have a comparable academic anchor.
- Her thinking on AI is grounded in fifteen years of work on how humans transfer trust to new systems, which is why boards use her to pressure-test AI adoption plans before they reach the workforce.
- Thinkers50 ranked her among the world’s 30 most influential management thinkers and gave her the 2015 Breakthrough Idea Award, signalling that her ideas have been judged consequential by peers, not only by bureau marketing.
- She works directly with boards and senior executives as an advisor, so the keynote is the visible part of a deeper practice on culture and governance.
Biography highlights
- Trust Fellow, Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, the first such fellowship at the school.
- Author of What’s Mine is Yours, Who Can You Trust? and How to Trust & Be Trusted; books translated into 14 languages.
- Three TED talks with more than 5 million combined views.
- Named one of the world’s 30 most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50; winner of the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award.
- Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum.
- Contributor to and subject of coverage in The New York Times, Financial Times, TIME, Wired, The Guardian and Fast Company; writer of the Rethink newsletter.
Biography
Most leadership crises are described as strategy problems and turn out to be trust problems. A workforce that has been through three restructures will not run faster because the new operating model is sharper. A board that has lost confidence in a CEO will not be rebuilt by a clearer plan. The active variable is whether people believe enough in the institution, the leadership, and each other to take risks on its behalf.
Rachel Botsman has spent two decades turning that observation into a working discipline. As the first Trust Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, she designed and teaches courses on trust and technology, and advises boards, senior leaders and governments on the same questions in live operating contexts. Her books, including Who Can You Trust? and How to Trust & Be Trusted, redefine trust as a confident relationship with the unknown rather than a synonym for assurance or predictability.
Her named frameworks give that idea operational form. The Trust Leap explains how people move from familiar to unfamiliar behaviour, which is why it has been useful for organisations deploying AI and automating workflows. The Trust Shift maps how authority has migrated from institutions to individuals and platforms. The Risk–Trust Lens gives senior leaders a way to read where their cultures sit on the spectrum between paralysis and recklessness.
Thinkers50 has ranked her among the 30 most influential management thinkers in the world and gave her its Breakthrough Idea Award. The World Economic Forum named her a Young Global Leader. Her three TED talks have been watched more than five million times. The reason her work has carried that distance is that it gives leaders something specific to do on a subject that most speakers can only describe.
Key speaking topics
- Trust as a leadership capability
- Trust and AI adoption
- Culture and decision-making under change
- The Trust Shift from institutions to individuals
- Designing for trust in new products and systems
- The future of work and the social contract
- Authority and accountability in modern organisations
Ideal for
- CEOs, CHROs and chief people officers leading organisations through restructure, integration, or cultural reset.
- Boards and risk committees evaluating AI deployment, governance, and workforce trust.
- Transformation, technology and product leaders responsible for adoption of new systems by employees or customers.
- Executive education and senior leadership programmes building common language around trust, accountability and decision-making.
Audience outcomes
- A working definition of trust that holds up to scrutiny inside a leadership team, not a motivational phrase.
- A read on where the organisation sits on the risk–trust spectrum and what that implies for current decisions.
- A clearer view of why specific change programmes, AI rollouts, or cultural initiatives are stalling, and where the trust gap actually lives.
- Specific language and frameworks (Trust Leap, Trust Shift, Risk–Trust Lens) that travel from the keynote into board and executive conversations.
- A sharper position on how authority, accountability, and AI intersect inside the organisation over the next two to three years.
Talks
A keynote on how senior leaders use the balance between risk and trust to make decisions in volatile conditions.
Key takeaways:
- The Risk–Trust Lens as a tool for reading organisational culture under pressure.
- Why composure, transparency and accountability behave differently in low-trust environments.
- Practical moves leaders can make to rebuild commitment after repeated change.
A keynote on why some innovations are adopted at scale and others fail despite better technology or design.
Key takeaways:
- The Trust Leap framework, drawn from fifteen years of work with Fortune 500 companies and startups.
- Why designing for trust is as material as designing for usability.
- How product, brand, and operating teams should align around the trust signals customers actually read.
A keynote on how AI changes the rules of human trust and what organisations need to address before they scale it.
Key takeaways:
- The Trust Shift framework, situating AI inside a longer history of trust migration.
- Why workforce and customer trust in AI are governed by different variables, and what that means for adoption sequencing.
- The questions boards should be asking before signing off on AI deployment, not after.
A keynote on how the employer–employee relationship is being rewritten by hybrid working, AI, and the erosion of institutional authority.
Key takeaways:
- Why engagement metrics describe symptoms, not causes.
- How hybrid and AI-augmented work change the basis on which people commit to organisations.
- What CHROs and senior leaders can do to rebuild the social contract of work.