What AI Can Learn About Trust From Banking

At the UN AI for Good Summit last week, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels made a simple observation:

"Without trust, there is no AI."

His argument wasn't that trust is disappearing. It was that our traditional mechanisms for creating trust are failing at scale.

To explain why, he traced the evolution of trust itself.

In the eighteenth century marketplace, trust was largely physical. A Dutch trader knew who they were dealing with because they saw them every day. Reputation was local, visible and personal. Presence itself was evidence. Trust was grounded in human relationships.

As trade expanded beyond local markets, that model no longer worked. You couldn't personally know every trading partner across borders and oceans. So trust migrated to institutions. Exchanges, banks, regulators and clearing houses became trusted intermediaries. The institution provided assurance where personal familiarity could not.