AI Is Exposing a Trust Problem in SaaS

Why this matters

Catherine spends her time with chief data officers and senior data leaders — the people inside organisations who are trying to make AI credible, not just exciting. Their experience is consistent: trust has become measurable, sales cycles are getting longer, more stakeholders are involved, and the scrutiny has changed. AI did not cause that. But it has made the problem harder to hide and more expensive to ignore.

Key ideas

Trust is now measurable — and it is showing up in your sales cycle. What used to be a fluffy, hard-to-quantify customer experience concept has become commercial. Sales cycles are getting longer. Legal is getting involved earlier. Due diligence is deeper. You can put a number on trust now by tracking how long it takes to close a deal. If that number is going in the wrong direction, you have a trust problem.

At a conference, everyone sounds the same. Catherine stood in the centre of an expo floor and did a 360-degree view. Every vendor was talking about agentic AI, generative AI, AI-enabled everything. Every pitch sounded identical. When every company says the same thing, buyers stop trying to evaluate and start trying to work out where the differences are hiding. Intentionally or not, that uniformity is eroding trust.

AI is not creating the trust gap. It is widening the one that was already there. SaaS companies have always over-promised and under-explained. The demo shows a pristine environment with clean data and no organisational friction. The asterisk that says "results depend on your data maturity, your internal alignment and whether Dave from finance and Susan from marketing can actually work together" does not make it into the pitch. AI just makes this gap more visible, more quickly.

The uncomfortable truth most SaaS companies avoid. They do not do everything. They probably do one or two things exceptionally well. But the pressure to look competitive leads to positioning that sounds like everyone else, which makes you less trustworthy, not more. Catherine's provocation: be brave enough to say what you do not do. "We don't do X, but we're exceptional at Y" is more credible than a one-stop-shop claim that no serious buyer believes.

The people responsible for AI inside organisations are now in a very exposed position. CDOs and data leaders are being asked to make AI work across the whole organisation — and everyone, including the board, has an opinion. For the first time, the soft skills that were brushed aside in data roles actually matter commercially. Can you make the case to finance, to marketing, to operations? Can you build enough internal trust to get the mandate you need? These are the conversations that determine whether AI strategy succeeds or stalls.

Scepticism is harder to maintain where you lack expertise. In areas where you know your subject, AI output is easy to challenge. In areas where you do not, it sounds authoritative. LLMs present conclusions as though they surveyed the entire internet and found consensus — which makes it cognitively easy to trust them, even when they are wrong. Building organisational AI literacy is not optional.

Questions for SaaS leaders

• If you are honest about what your product does exceptionally well versus what it does adequately, are you selling accordingly — or are you pitching the one-stop-shop story because it feels safer?
• Where in your organisation are AI outputs being trusted without enough scrutiny — and who owns accountability when they are wrong?
• How are you measuring trust with your customers beyond NPS? Are longer sales cycles, increased legal involvement or more stakeholders in the room telling you something?

About the guest

Catherine Dowden-King works at the intersection of data leadership, AI community and executive credibility. She leads marketing and brand engagement at Orbition Group and is editor of Driven by Data Magazine, where she creates content, events and conversations for a global community of senior data leaders. Connect with Catherine on LinkedIn and find out more about Orbition Group.