Every Recommendation Is an Act of Trust

Every civilization has depended on this distinction, even if it has rarely articulated it. We trust friends instinctively, but societies cannot be built on instinct alone. They require systems that allow confidence to extend beyond personal relationships.

Human civilization has always depended on borrowing the judgment of strangers.

Every time we accept a recommendation, we are borrowing someone else's judgment in the hope that it reduces our own uncertainty. When a friend recommends a restaurant, we borrow their experience. When a physician recommends a treatment, we borrow years of training we do not possess ourselves. When an attorney offers legal advice or an investor backs a company, they are doing something more than sharing information. They are lending us a piece of their own judgment.

That simple exchange has shaped civilization for thousands of years. The systems surrounding it have changed, but the principle has remained remarkably constant.

During the Renaissance, merchants leaving Florence faced a problem that threatened to limit commerce across Europe. Carrying enough gold to finance a journey was dangerous, often impossible. The great banking families, including the Medici, solved that problem by creating trusted financial networks. A merchant could deposit money in Florence and receive a letter of credit that could be redeemed hundreds of miles away by another Medici bank.

The paper itself had almost no intrinsic value. It was simply a piece of parchment. What gave it value was the institution standing behind it and the confidence both parties placed in that institution.

The innovation wasn't the letter of credit. It was the ability to scale trust.

History has repeated that pattern ever since. Contracts, courts, universities, professional licensing, accounting standards and financial institutions all emerged for the same reason. They allowed people to place confidence in someone they had never met. Once those systems proved themselves reliable, they quietly disappeared into everyday life. We stopped thinking about them because trust itself had become infrastructure.

For most of my career, I thought of trust as something people earned and institutions protected. It wasn't until this summer that I realized I had begun extending that same trust to something entirely different.

Earlier this summer I spent nearly two months traveling through the South of France and Italy. Like most people, I planned the trip carefully, researching villages, restaurants, museums and places I didn't want to miss. At some point I asked AI to help me build a thirty-day itinerary. It suggested villages I had never heard of, scenic routes I probably wouldn't have considered and experiences that likely never would have appeared on the first page of a traditional search.

At first, I treated those recommendations the same way I would a guidebook. They were simply another source of ideas.

Looking back, I can't tell you exactly when it happened. Trust rarely announces itself. It accumulates quietly until one day you realize you've stopped asking whether you should rely on something and simply started doing it.

When I couldn't decide between two restaurants, I asked AI. When I wondered whether a small village was worth the detour or whether I should spend another day on the coast before heading inland, I asked AI again. Without consciously deciding to, I had begun borrowing its judgment.

What surprised me wasn't that every recommendation was perfect. It wasn't. What surprised me was how naturally AI had become one of the voices whose judgment I was willing to borrow, alongside friends, locals and my own experience. The transfer of trust had happened quietly, long before I realized it had happened at all.

That realization stayed with me because I suspect it isn't unique to me. I think many of us are making the same transition without consciously recognizing it.

We still tend to describe artificial intelligence as though it's competing with search engines. I don't think that's the right comparison anymore. Search helped us discover information. Increasingly, intelligent systems are helping us decide what to do with it.

That distinction fundamentally changes the role technology plays in our lives. The internet dramatically expanded our choices. We could compare hundreds of products, read dozens of reviews and explore competing opinions before reaching our own conclusions. Recommendation works differently. It narrows possibilities until confidence becomes possible.

That's exactly what I found myself doing throughout my travels. I wasn't asking for more options. I was asking for help deciding between the options I already had. I suspect businesses will experience the same shift.

For most of the last twenty-five years, organizations competed to be discovered. Visibility became the currency of the internet. Increasingly, they will compete for something different. They will compete to become the recommendation that earns confidence.

That isn't simply a marketing challenge. It's a trust challenge.

History teaches us that trust cannot be manufactured. It isn't created by clever advertising or memorable slogans. It emerges slowly as independent pieces of evidence begin reinforcing the same conclusion. Reputation, expertise, identity, independent citations, consistent information and a history of delivering what was promised matter not because any one of them is decisive, but because together they create a pattern that becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

Artificial intelligence isn't inventing a new definition of trust. It is evaluating the same body of evidence people have relied upon for centuries.

Five hundred years ago, the Medici helped build the financial infrastructure that allowed trust to move across Europe. I believe we're standing at a similar moment today. The infrastructure we're beginning to build won't move money. It will move confidence. It won't determine where capital flows. It will increasingly influence where human attention, decisions and trust are placed.

Every civilization eventually invents new ways to scale trust. I believe that is exactly what we are witnessing today. We experience trust emotionally, but we build it through evidence.

The civilizations that endure are ultimately defined by what and whom they choose to trust