White paper | Roundtable series, paper two | July 2026
AI & The Trust Deficit
The distance between what your executive team believes about AI and what your workforce experiences, and how to close it before it becomes permanent.
61%
business-critical decisions
9%
"Thank you Jenny, this is really interesting. I particularly love the action recommendations."
Download the Whitepaper
The argument
The trust deficit may not sit where you think it does
The gap in AI adoption may sit less between an organisation and its workforce than between the executive layer and everyone else. Senior decision-makers use unapproved AI tools at twice the rate of the people below them.
And that gap becomes visible in one place: the conversation between a line manager and their team. Managers did not create it and are unlikely to close it alone. They are simply where it surfaces, which may be why it is so often mistaken for a manager capability problem and funded as one.
Trust is not built in the town hall. It is built, or lost, in the one-to-one that happens the following week.
What you will find inside
Six places trust breaks
Each drawn from a senior leaders roundtable convened in London on 16 July 2026, and set against published research.
The time question
The question doing most damage to trust was not about the technology at all. It was what happens to the time it saves, and the instinct in the room was to answer it with monitoring.
The permission gap
Where the protected licence goes to whoever puts themselves forward, the rollout selects for confidence and proximity to power. Opt-in is a mechanism, and mechanisms have demographics.
The function fault line
Trust breaks horizontally as well as vertically. Employees watching data protection, security and enablement contradict each other may reasonably conclude that nobody is in charge.
The inverted fear
In some organisations people fear replacement. In others they fear being caught not using it. Managers are handling two opposite fears with one script, and nobody wrote it.
The craft objection
Some refusal is not resistance. It is a judgement about how expertise gets built, and it is often correct. Read that way, it becomes information rather than a training need.
The values test
Climate impact, professional ethics and creative integrity are now live reasons people decline. Few AI strategies appear to have a position on any of them, and silence reads as an answer.
The evidence
Three numbers from the paper
65% vs 31%
88% vs 21%
77%
The framework
The EQUITAS™ Framework for Equitable AI
Seven practical commitments, developed through practitioner research across four continents. In this paper the framework is used as a decision split: what only the executive layer can settle, and what then cascades to managers. Every empty row is a question your managers will be asked and cannot answer.
EQUITAS™ is published in full in AI for Equity: Creating a More Equitable Society for All (Emerald Publishing, 27 October 2026), co-authored by Jenny Garrett OBE and Leah-Sunshine Garrett.
The Evidence
The argument against this paper
A paper that only makes its own case is marketing. Section 6 sets out the strongest challenges to the argument above, with our answers: that fear works and trust may be optional, that training managers is displacement activity, and that low trust in AI might simply be good judgement.
Where the evidence runs out, we say so.
From the room
What practitioners said
We have had people overworked for years. The first instinct when technology gives some of that time back is to work out how to catch them enjoying it.
There is something right there about bias, and about who is actually getting the opportunity to have those licences.
We went for pull rather than push. Access followed enthusiasm, not seniority, and people started asking when it would be their turn.
We talk about human in the loop. The real question is which humans, and whether they are in the loop or in the lead.
About
Jenny Garrett OBE
Jenny Garrett OBE is the founder and CEO of Jenny Garrett Global, a specialist leadership development consultancy in its 20th year. She holds an OBE for services to Entrepreneurship and Women in Business, is a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of HR Professionals, and is a graduate of MIT’s AI Strategy and Leadership Programme.
She co-hosts the AI for Equity podcast with her daughter Leah-Sunshine Garrett, and co-authors the book AI for Equity: Creating a More Equitable Society for All, published by Emerald in October 2026.
Jenny works with organisations including the NHS, National Gas, Equans, UK Parliament, Crisis UK and Cafcass to build leadership capability at the intersection of inclusion, equity and emerging technology.
“Thank you Jenny, this is really interesting. I particularly love the action recommendations.”
The roundtable
Convened in London on 16 July 2026 for senior leaders in People and Technology professions, under Chatham House rules. Eight to ten leaders, one morning, no slides and no vendors.
The next session
October 2026. We convene quarterly in London and are always looking for host organisations.
The first paper
AI & The Two-Tier Workforce, March 2026. This paper stands alone, but the first sets out the fuller map.
