Trust enables us to navigate uncertainty, place our faith in people, and take leaps into the unknown.
Rachel Botsman is a leading authority on trust in the modern world, known for connecting history, technology, and human behaviour in fresh and engaging ways. She is the author of three influential books – What’s Mine is Yours, Who Can You Trust?,
and How To Trust & Be Trusted. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, Financial Times, Time Magazine, and Fast Company. She also writes Rethink, a newsletter with more than 90,000 subscribers worldwide.
Rachel is a world-renowned speaker, celebrated for her clear insights and warm, engaging storytelling. She has spoken on global stages from TED to the World Economic Forum and delivered keynotes for organisations including Salesforce, Goldman Sachs, Adobe, Gartner, and EY. Her TED talks have been viewed more than five million times, and she is consistently rated a favourite speaker at major events.
Alongside her writing and teaching, Rachel explores how art and design can spark new ways of thinking. Her installation Roots of Trust was featured at the London Design Biennale, where audiences were invited to experience trust not as an abstract concept but as a living system.
Rachel was the first Trust Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, where she teaches leaders and entrepreneurs how to lead with trust in a changing world.
Recognised as one of the world’s top 30 management thinkers and honoured as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, she has worked on every continent, except, so far, Antarctica
Talking Points
Leading with Trust in Uncertain Times
When the world feels complex and fast-moving, trust becomes a powerful source of clarity and confidence. It gives people the courage to take smart risks, collaborate across teams, and lean into change instead of resisting it. Yet despite how often we use the word, trust is still clouded by myths. In this keynote, Rachel deconstructs those misconceptions and invites audiences to rethink trust as something they can actively shape. With her ‘Risk–Trust Lens’ framework, she shows why the balance between risk and trust is the hallmark of adaptive leadership and shares practical tools leaders can use to build cultures where people feel safe, supported, and ready to step into the unknown.Leading with Trust in Uncertain Times
Participants will learn:
• Why trust is the foundation of resilience in uncertain times.
• How to use the ‘Risk–Trust Lens’ to make smarter decisions under pressure.
• The four traits every leader must consistently demonstrate to earn trust.
• Why cultures built on trust consistently outperform those built on control
Trust by Design: What Makes Innovation Stic
Why do some innovations fail while others succeed? The difference is rarely the technology; it’s whether people trust it enough to make the leap. Every breakthrough depends on what Rachel calls a Trust Leap: the decision to embrace a new way of working, creating, or connecting. Yet too often, innovators obsess over features and functions and overlook the trust conditions that truly determine adoption. Drawing on 15 years of work with Fortune 500 companies and start-ups, Rachel shares her ‘TrustLeap’ framework, showing why designing for trust is as essential as designing for usability or beauty. Through stories that span from historical inventions to today’s disruptive start-ups, she reveals how trust is the hidden design layer that allows ideas to take root and grow.Trust by Design: What Makes Innovation Stic
Participants will learn:
• Why trust is the bridge that makes people willing to take risks on new ideas.
• The design principles that encourage people to make a ‘Trust Leap.’
Rethinking the New Rules of Trust & AI
AI is rapidly reshaping how we make decisions, create, work, and even trust one another. But here’s the challenge: most of the questions about trust and AI are framed incorrectly. The real issue is not whether people should trust AI, but how we design AI systems to be genuinely trustworthy. Rachel uses her ‘Trust Shift’ framework to show how every major leap in history has required new forms of trust, and why AI marks a fundamentally different moment that forces us to rethink the rules altogether.Rethinking the New Rules of Trust & AI
Participants will learn:
• Why the real question is not “should we trust AI?” but “when is it trustworthy?”
• The challenges and possibilities of shifting trust from people to intelligent systems
• How the AI Trust Matrix reveals where different systems stand on trustworthiness
• The four dimensions that determine whether an AI system earns or loses
Video
Rachel Botsman: Ready to Rethink?
Rachel Botsman: In Technology We Trust? | World Economic Forum
Rachel Botsman: D Congress 2021 | Saxton Speakers
The Currency Of Trust | Rachel Botsman | DLD 2019
Rachel Botsman: Why Transparency Does Not Equal Trust | DLD Munich
From the moment we spoke about what I was trying to achieve with the conference to the feedback received it was evident that Rachel is a genuine world class speaker who knows how to stir thi ... keep reading Commonwealth Bank
Rachel Botsman was a brilliant speaker at the 2010 Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting. She captured imaginations when speaking about how collaborative technologies are reshaping our relationships and reinventing the world around us in life-changing ways. Rachel is on the vanguard of an extraordinary movement and is sweeping us up with her as she creates new paths into the future.
Rachel is a genuine world class speaker who knows how to stir thinking and encourage an audience to open their minds. Months on, I am still receiving emails about her talk. Her polished but warm style coupled with her relevant and clever stories leave an audience with a genuine sense of wonder and awe but most importantly it leaves them curious and hungry for more! I would not hesitate in booking Rachel for any event that calls for a world class thought leader - especially if you are after someone to disrupt and stir thinking.
She kept our 2000 delegates on the edge of their seats for over an hour, not only with the quality of her content but also with her humour and engaging style.
Not one single day has gone by since the event without external & internal commendations on her engagement with our audience. Her message really connected and impacted the entire audience.
Rachel's insightful session was engaging and authentic. She really made a personalized connection. The informal, open-ended format and seamless online experience allowed our audience to ask questions and engage in a lively conversation with her.
What a session! We got some really positive feedback about the content but also about the virtual rapport that you managed to create.
Rachel's talk both provoked and inspired, setting off an active conversation that continues to this day and worldwide within the company.
I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank Rachel, on behalf of the Better Boards team, for presenting at the 2014 Australasian Better Boards Conference. Her time, effort and input into the conference assisted in making the weekend a highly successful and informative event. We had approximately 400 people attend the conference over the three days and everyone we spoke to said they had taken away an abundance of ideas which they were excited to implement into their respective organisations. Very inspirational and thought-provoking presentation.
