“Think of AI as a piece of world-class, designer furniture,” says Jary Carter, co-founder and CRO of B2B-focused commerce platform OroCommerce. “If you put a $20,000 Italian sofa in a home filled with clutter, dust, and bad flooring, it doesn’t make the house look better. It just further highlights your mess. In business, that mess is legacy systems, fragmented data, and siloed teams. If you haven’t built a unified digital infrastructure first, AI will only accentuate your flaws. It also won’t improve your customer experience by highlighting inefficiencies directly to customers.”

While throwing AI at existing data gaps won’t solve your collaboration problems, the automation isn’t necessarily to blame. Trust-building needs to happen alongside tech implementations because otherwise, the right data won’t be shared, people and machines won’t have access to the info they need, and the entire collaboration will falter.

Laying the foundation for better collaboration

The emergence of gen AI means that when we talk about trust infrastructure, we can no longer consider cultural and organizational trust alone. Leaders must also consider what that trust infrastructure looks like for their digital applications and automations.