At the Royal Academy of Engineering last week, I had the opportunity to speak on trust and innovation. It was a reminder that innovation is not failing because we lack ideas, talent, or investment. It is struggling because trust is eroding faster than progress can scale.
The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer paints the wider backdrop: Grievance is now the dominant public sentiment. Six in ten people globally hold active grievances against institutions. Optimism for the next generation is collapsing.
As grievance rises, innovations like AI stop being seen as progress, and start feeling like displacement.
The absence of truth
At the Royal Academy, what struck me most was how the voices of these brilliant engineers, people dedicating their lives to solving real societal problems, can be missing in public debate.
Their lack of representation in everyday conversations about technology and innovation mean discourse risks being limited to short-term agendas, misinformation, and spectacle.
Our data shows that when innovation is independently vetted, by trusted experts, acceptance rises sharply. Vetting is not a bureaucratic overhead. It’s the foundation of public confidence.
The absence of expert voices mirrors a potentially larger crisis. We regularly see in developed markets like the UK that trust in innovation is lowest. Legitimacy must be earned but the cost of speed without consent is high.
Without trust, even the truth has no audience
Last week, I also had the privilege of interviewing, Karthik Ramanna Professor of Business and Public Policy at the University of Oxford, Blavatnik School of Government. He authored ‘The Age of Outrage’ a bold call for moral courage and institutional renewal in a time of deep division.
In his book, Prof Ramanna reminds us: "It doesn’t matter that you are right if people do not trust you to be right." Moreover, facts alone do not rebuild legitimacy.
Leaders must recognise the emotional realities people live through. This includes fear, disillusionment, displacement, not just economic models. It’s where public relations demands public repair.
Trust in innovation must be built by leaders who stay close to the ground truth, even as they build for tomorrow. Progress that advances only a few leaves lasting grievance. Leadership today must ask a harder question than "how do we win?" and instead: "How do we rise together?"
Innovation must not be seen as a zero-sum race, but as a collective project: Prosperity, fairness, participation, these must be the measures of success. Otherwise, every advance will be met with resistance, not gratitude.
Progress without belonging becomes alienation
The Trust Barometer shows that listening, transparency, and shared control over innovation are now top drivers of public trust: Innovation built with, not for the people.
Technological brilliance without human belonging breeds suspicion. To build the future, technology leaders must create structures where people are not just recipients of innovation, they are co-owners of it.
It means enlisting the practice of connection before correction in order to change hearts. To cite Massive Attack’s Tear Drop: “Love is a verb. Love is a doing word.”
As Prof Ramanna put it in our interview, in the age of outrage: “You earn the right to say more by doing more, not promising more.”
Trust is also a verb, and the infrastructure on which future societies will either rise or fracture. But the future is not an innocent space, it will be inherited unevenly unless we act deliberately.
To lead through grievance, rebuild optimism, and deliver innovation responsibly, leaders must:
• Understand economic and emotional realities: Alongside future forecasts, innovation must be rooted in the emotional realities of fear, displacement, and hope.
• Champion shared interests: Trust grows when innovation advances shared values: prosperity, fairness, opportunity and not just shareholder value.
• Create opportunities for participation: Giving communities agency over how innovation shapes their lives is not a risk, it’s the only durable foundation for future adoption and legitimacy
While technological leadership today often wins the moment, stewardship wins the future. Without stewardship, innovation becomes extraction. With stewardship, innovation becomes inheritance.
Being a steward of innovation demands patience over speed; transparency over control; ethical rigor over strategic convenience and the humility to serve both markets and generations.
Sat Dayal is Managing Director of Technology at Edelman UK.