Rachel Botsman is a world-leading authority on trust in the digital age and how it shapes leadership, innovation, and the adoption of emerging technologies such as AI. Named one of the Thinkers50 Top 30 Management Thinkers and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, she helps organizations understand why trust is the hidden force behind successful ideas, strong cultures, and transformative change.
A former Trust Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, Rachel is the bestselling author of Who Can You Trust?, What’s Mine Is Yours, and How to Trust & Be Trusted. Her insights have appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, WIRED, Time, and The Financial Times, and her TED Talks have been viewed more than 5 million times worldwide. She has delivered keynote presentations for leading organizations including Salesforce, Goldman Sachs, Adobe, EY, and Gartner, as well as global stages such as TED and the World Economic Forum.
In her engaging and thought-provoking presentations, Rachel equips audiences with practical frameworks—including her Trust Leap and Risk–Trust Lens—to understand how trust drives leadership, innovation, and organizational success. Audiences gain actionable strategies for building trust within teams and cultures, navigating risk and rapid technological change, and leading confidently as AI and new technologies reshape how we work and collaborate. Her keynotes challenge leaders to rethink trust not as a soft concept, but as a critical driver of innovation, adoption, and competitive advantage in a rapidly changing world.
- Leading with Trust in Uncertain Times
- 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.
- Trust by Design: What Makes Innovation Stick
- 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.
- Rethinking the New Rules of Trust & AI
- 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.