On April 7, Researchscape and PR Club brought together communications leaders to wrestle with one of the thorniest questions facing our industry: how do you build and maintain trust when AI keeps redrawing the map? Here are the key takeaways. PR Club thanks Researchscape for their generous support of this event.
For $2,995 in June, you can purchase a block of 5 questions in Researchscape’sIT Pro Omnibus survey. But if you act this month, they’ll give new customers a block of 5 questions for free. They’ll survey 500 IT professionals representative of the overall US industry, by headcount of the organization they work for, job title, and role.
Moderator Nicky McHugh, Global Head of Communications and Public Affairs at Xylem and a veteran of reputation management at Schneider Electric and Ogilvy, kicked things off with an observation from this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer: two of the top 10 findings pointed to insularity, a world where people increasingly distrust anyone who doesn’t look, think, or live as they do. “Trust has gone to the very core of our identity,” McHugh observed, before passing the baton to the panelists for their take.
The State of Trust: Declining, Multidimensional, and Urgent
Larry Weber, founder of Weber Shandwick and Racepoint Global, author of seven books, and a self-described technology optimist, drew a distinction between three related but separate concepts: trust, authenticity, and truth. Authenticity, he argued, belongs in the technology bucket. Trust and truth belong in the societal one. Trust has eroded largely because of the collapse of shared media authority. When Walter Cronkite spoke, Weber recalled, that was truth. Today, anyone with a WiFi connection can be a publisher and that shared baseline has evaporated.
And yet, Weber pointed out a paradox: we trust technology with our most sensitive transactions – banking, signing documents, managing our money – all from our phones, but we still can’t use those same phones to vote. Trust infrastructure is robust in some domains and absent in others.
Simon Erskine Locke, founder and CEO of Tauth Labs and Communications Match, shared a multi-layered framework for thinking about trust: human-to-human trust, brand, financial, and beyond. The trajectory, he said, is troubling. Trust in digital content has been sliding for years, accelerated by the staggering volume of fraudulent and misleading content now possible through generative AI.
Locke didn’t mince words about the stakes. He described conversations with the head of M&A at a major New York law firm who confirmed a rising tide of fake financial disclosures around quarterly earnings. A major Japanese bank, he shared, was taking down eight fake websites per day. “This is a $1 trillion a year problem,” Locke said, citing FBI reporting on fraud losses.
We may be heading toward a “zero trust world,” and if we get there, the entire digital economy is in jeopardy. If people can’t trust that a website is real or a document is legitimate, systems start to buckle.
What Communicators Need to Know Now
Both panelists agreed on this much: communications professionals need to get more fluent in technology. They need to understand how data flows, where it comes from, and how it’s authenticated. Tech is no longer someone else’s department.
Weber urged communicators to think about adjacency, or understanding how to position themselves and their clients in relation to emerging technologies. For example, client questions are shifting from “how do we use AI?” to “how do we control how we show up in AI?” It’s the perennial challenge of earned media influence, now applied to a new medium.
He also flagged the next major disruption hurtling towards us: sponsored content inside AI-generated answers. “Has OpenAI started the ads yet?” Weber asked. “Communicators, get ready for an even wilder ride.”
Locke emphasized the importance of maintaining healthy skepticism, a muscle the best communicators share with journalists. “Just because AI told you something doesn’t make it true,” he cautioned, pushing back against the temptation to prioritize volume over quality. The ability to produce 100 AI-generated articles – or 100 AI-generated pitches – doesn’t mean you should.
Both panelists were deliberate in framing these risks as fundamentally human, not technological. “It’s not the dark side of generative AI – it’s the dark side of human beings,” Weber said.
Content Authentication: A Technology for the Trust Crisis
The heart of the panel centered on content authentication – a technology Locke has been building with Tauth Labs and its work with the Content Authenticity Initiative, originally led by Adobe.
Locke broke the technology into three steps:
- Verification of you or your company.
- Integration of a digital watermark and credentials into a piece of content at the individual document level.
- Immutable logging via blockchain to create a permanent, verifiable record of provenance.
He compared the shift to the evolution from HTTP to HTTPS – a layer of digital security, but applied at the content level rather than the website level. The user experience is designed to be simple: for the creator, it’s one click to authenticate; for the viewer, it’s a hover to verify provenance.
The underlying standard, C2PA, was developed collaboratively by a coalition that includes Adobe, Google, Meta, the BBC, and others. Tauth Labs was approved as a certificate authority in early 2025, and Locke noted that C2PA has only been certifying users of the technology since October 2024. We’re still in the early innings.
Locke also introduced a framing he’s been road-testing in conversations around the world: Protect, Detect, and Correct:
- Protect: Use content authentication and cybersecurity to safeguard digital assets so audiences can distinguish authentic content from fraud.
- Detect: Deploy tools to identify fake or malicious content circulating in the wild.
- Correct: Respond to threats using a combination of communications playbooks and, increasingly, technological countermeasures – including the possibility of using AI tools to combat AI-generated fraud.
He drew an important distinction between content authentication and traditional cybersecurity. Cybersecurity protects a company’s internal systems, while content authentication extends that protection outward, traveling with content wherever it’s shared. Rather than just defending the perimeter, content authentication builds trust into every asset that leaves your organization.
Looking Ahead
Locke predicted that within three years, all high-value content will carry some form of authentication. Weber added that the legal profession has a critical role to play in establishing frameworks for digital authenticity like this.
The panel closed with an audience question about Anthropic’s Project Glasswing. The panelists used it as a springboard to distinguish between system-level cybersecurity (protecting infrastructure) and content-level authentication (protecting what you publish and share). Both matter, but they solve different problems.
The overarching message was cautious optimism. The challenges are real and accelerating, but so are the tools and standards to address them. Communicators who understand this landscape will be best positioned to protect their organizations and clients.
The panelists were Larry Weber, Chairman of Racepoint Global, and Simon Erskine Locke, Founder & CEO of Tauth Labs. The panel was moderated by Nicky McHugh, Head of Global Communications at Xylem.
This blog was written by Simone Migliori, PR Club Board Member