Trust: A technological commitment to a core value

Today, trust is an essential part of a relationship customers have with a brand—a prerequisite for unlocking their allegiance. With every digital experience, trust can be earned based on how a company does business, manages information, and treats its customers’ data. Trust is more than an abstract concept; it is a critical value that must be backed by technological commitments.

RESPONSIBLE CUSTODIANS OF DATA

As the world’s leader in helping people create digital experiences, Adobe understands the power of data.  Whether we are giving creators and communicators the tools they need to tell their stories and collaborate with ease; unlocking new business workflows and enabling efficient digital document processes for every surface and platform; or empowering businesses to provide real-time personalization throughout the customer journey, data is what enables us to deliver exceptional digital experiences.

And in a world that has shifted away from third-party cookies, first-party data—information that customers choose to share directly with a company—is what powers these types of experiences. In exchange for that data, customers expect to be able to trust that a company’s solutions are secure, that their privacy preferences are respected, and their data will be treated with care—all of which requires a comprehensive and proactive approach. Companies need to deliver a world-class privacy experience, where customers’ choices come first, and any access to or usage of data is grounded in transparency and aligns with customers’ expectations. And as global threats increase, companies should also make sure they’re investing in the latest security technologies, adopt a “Shift Left” approach to secure code from the start, and continually test the strength of their own defenses.

Companies also need to make sure they are helping their customers maintain compliance with the growing number of global data security and privacy regulations, from ISO 27001, to FedRAMP, to PCI, to GDPR, and more. As these laws continue to multiply—each bringing their own nuances that vary by industry and geography—having a dedicated global policy team helps companies not only keep up, but lead, by helping policymakers around the world pass laws that are both good for the consumer and make sense for business. When new regulations do pass, rather than designing a whole new engineering effort to comply with each one, companies should instead implement a controls framework (like Adobe’s CCF), designed to help their customers meet the common criteria within leading industry regulations. This way, engineering teams are building upon a foundation of existing controls and only adding new architecture to account for any gaps a new regulation may introduce. It’s simpler, more cost efficient, and most importantly, enables companies to achieve compliance faster.

The bottom line is: managing data is complicated. That’s why one way to foster a simple and holistic approach in a company’s trust efforts is to form a single Trust organization that combines security, privacy, policy, legal, and compliance together. This alignment allows a company to create the deep, strategic, integrated investment in trust needed to meet the expectations of their customers.

ALIGNING ACTIONS TO VALUES

Equally as important as the products and services a company delivers is who they are as a company. Today’s customers want to be confident that the businesses they engage with are acting with integrity and upholding their company values. Customers should be able to trust that a company’s development process, as well as their technology itself, is ethical, responsible, and inclusive. Companies should consider how they can build accessible features into every product, to enable everyone to access the critical digital services that power our modern world. And for companies that host content on their platforms, having thorough content moderation capabilities helps ensure content is safe and lawful for their users.

Nowhere is aligning a company’s actions to its values more critical than in the development of AI. AI powers hundreds of capabilities across Adobe products, from streamlining image editing processes, to automating digital document workflows, to helping enterprise customers gain data-driven insights and target their marketing for better results. We know that there is a tendency to believe that because a computer is doing the work, the work must be free from the biases of human decision-making. But AI requires data to perform, and the data comes from humans, which means the data itself can be biased. Without careful testing and management, AI-powered systems or features can produce results that discriminate or disparage and do not reflect a company’s own values. That’s why it’s so important to implement an AI Ethics program that incorporates training, testing, and a thorough review process to ensure products and features meet a company’s ethical standards before they are released. At Adobe, our AI Ethics Review Board helps make sure we are testing for any unintended outcomes and fixing them if they arise and that we are leveraging our learnings to help policymakers develop important global AI regulations.

But today, a commitment to responsible innovation must go even further. Customers expect companies to step up as leaders in areas where they are uniquely positioned to make an impact. For some companies this could be taking a lead on sustainability; for others it may be working to end homelessness. For Adobe, this means using our decades of experience in image-editing to establish a global coalition (the Content Authenticity Initiative) to fight misinformation and restore trust in online content through digital provenance and attribution.

A COMMITMENT TO TRANSPARENCY

To truly earn customer trust today, all of these commitments must be built upon a foundation of transparency. When companies tell people what they are doing and how they are doing it, they empower customers to make an informed choice to engage with them. And they open the door for customers to work with them as partners and together create a better digital world powered by trust.

To learn more about the state of trust in today’s digital economy, check out Adobe’s 2022 Trust Report.

Dana Rao is executive vice president, general counsel and chief trust officer at Adobe.