In the AI Era, Trust Scarcity Is Rewriting the Rules of Brand Growth

As AI transforms how people discover, evaluate and buy, brands are entering a new scarcity: not attention, but trust. In an environment where content is abundant and inexpensive to produce, credibility signals - trusted human points of view, expert proof and community advocacy - are becoming the differentiators that determine discoverability, preference and long-term growth. 

From the Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo in London, we spoke with Amy Abatangle, VP Analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice, about why trust is the new moat, what human experience (HX) means in practice, and how CMOs can operationalize human-centric brand strategies without defaulting to “more content” or “more personalization” as the answer.

Journalists who would like to speak with Amy regarding this topic can contact Jordan.Brackenbury@gartner.com. Members of the media can reference this material in articles with proper attribution to Gartner.

A: For the last decade, brands competed for attention in a world where content was comparatively expensive to produce. AI flips that dynamic: content becomes abundant and low-cost, which changes what’s scarce and valuable (see Figure 1).

Now, trust is scarce. A Gartner survey of over 1,000 UK consumers conducted in August to September 2025 found just 60% of consumers trust big brands, down from 70% in 2021. 

In AI-shaped feeds, search, recommendations - and eventually agentic buying experiences - brands increasingly win (or lose) based on trust signals, such as advocacy, consistency and expert proof. In this context, brand building becomes intentional trust-signal design, and trust influences not just preference, but discoverability. When trust becomes scarce, brands must focus on creating credibility instead of just reach.

A: HX is any person (or personified proxy) who mediates trust, meaning and decision-making between a brand and its audience. HX is the portfolio of human interactions a brand deliberately deploys to earn trust—such as creators, earned experts, executives, employees and frontline teams, and sometimes proxies like mascots, avatars or AI personas. 

By 2030, enterprises that govern HX as a formal brand system will increase customer lifetime value by 20% versus peers that fail to actively manage human touchpoints.

Gartner’s HX framework highlights four elements that HX must balance:

• Authenticity: narrative clarity, transparency and relevance

• Expertise: credible, actionable guidance

• Belonging: reinforcement of shared identities and values

• Reliability: consistent delivery of the brand promise

A: CMOs should govern HX as they would other aspects of their brand experience by:

• Mapping where human trust is scarce and defensible by building journey maps that include AI agents and machine-led paths, identifying the moments where only a human can change belief, emotion or decision. 

• Prioritizing high-impact human touchpoints, focusing humans on negotiations, complex service recovery, escalations and community activation.

• Embedding human-in-the-loop governance, auditing workflows to determine where humans oversee, augment or override AI.

• Establishing HX metrics, by looking for trust signals, such as advocacy, references or expert proof or measuring impact on customer journeys.

• Equipping humans to succeed, developing role-specific narrative playbooks for key roles.