Trust is dead. Can the 'Chief Trust Officer' revive it? (www.businessinsider.com)

Companies are adding “chief trust officers” (CTrOs) to their C-suites to confront a widening trust crisis driven by data breaches, opaque business practices, and rapid advances in generative AI that make deepfakes and disinformation cheap and scalable. Unlike traditional CISOs, CTrOs are positioned as proactive, business-facing leaders who merge technical safeguards with communication and policy: they must safeguard sensitive data, ensure regulatory compliance, certify ethical and accurate AI use, and publicly “own the proof” that systems behave as promised. Forrester’s early look at 16 CTrOs shows the role is still niche (average tenure ~2 years), but adoption is growing as executives acknowledge trust as a strategic necessity even while customers remain skeptical. For the AI/ML community, CTrOs signal a shift from purely technical defenses to operationalized governance and external accountability. Expect increased emphasis on explainability, model auditing, provenance and deepfake detection, standardized safety evidence for deployments, and direct engagement with regulators and customers. That could accelerate adoption of tooling for model transparency, monitoring, and provenance tracking — but also risks becoming a token title if companies treat it as PR rather than embedding measurable, technical controls. Ultimately, CTrOs will influence how organizations balance rapid AI innovation with verifiable safeguards that rebuild user trust.