Author & Trust Expert
Rachel Botsman is a leading expert on trust in the modern world. Her two critically acclaimed books, What’s Mine is Yours and Who Can You Trust?, have been translated into 14 languages. She has been recognized as one of the world’s 30 most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50, and honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Her TED talks have been viewed more than five million times.
Rachel Botsman: In Technology We Trust?
Rachel Botsman Speaks at D Congress
TED Talk: The Currency Of Trust
Rachel Botsman: Why Transparency Does Not Equal Trust
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 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:
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:
Rachel Botsman is a leading authority on trust in the modern world, known for connecting history, technology, and human behaviour in fresh and engaging ways. She is the author of three influential books – What’s Mine is Yours, Who Can You Trust?, and How To Trust & Be Trusted. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, Financial Times, Time Magazine, and Fast Company. She also writes Rethink, a newsletter with more than 90,000 subscribers worldwide.
Rachel is a world-renowned speaker, celebrated for her clear insights and warm, engaging storytelling. She has spoken on global stages from TED to the World Economic Forum and delivered keynotes for organizations including Salesforce, Goldman Sachs, Adobe, Gartner, and EY. Her TED talks have been viewed more than five million times, and she is consistently rated a favourite speaker at major events.
Alongside her writing and teaching, Rachel explores how art and design can spark new ways of thinking. Her installation Roots of Trust was featured at the London Design Biennale, where audiences were invited to experience trust not as an abstract concept but as a living system.
Rachel was the first Trust Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, where she teaches leaders and entrepreneurs how to lead with trust in a changing world. Recognized as one of the world’s top 30 management thinkers and honoured as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, she has worked on every continent, except, so far, Antarctica.
“She kept our 2000 delegates on the edge of their seats for over an hour, not only with the quality of her content but also with her humour and engaging style.”
– CIPD
“Rachel’s talk both provoked and inspired, setting off an active conversation that continues to this day and worldwide within the company.”
– Microsoft
“Not one single day has gone by since the event without external and internal commendations on her engagement with our audience. Her message really connected and impacted the entire audience."
– Adobe
