Davos 2025:“Build Trust To Unlock Hope”

(MENAFN- PRovoke) Key highlights:

• Two-thirds of people around the world say their families will be better off in the next generation; two-thirds believe business and government leaders lie to them; and almost two-thirds believe they are discriminated against. And 40% endorse hostile measures ranging from deliberate disinformation to physical violence in order to address those grievances.
• More than half of respondents believe capitalism has failed.
• “We need to restore hope that the future can be better. And as business, our role is to bring economic optimism back.”-Dolf van den Brink
• “If we don't think through the sociology of AI, I think it risks undermining people's trust even more.”-Brad Smith
• “We see a doubling in economic optimism if there's trust in institutions. So trust becomes the key to unlock hope.”-Richard Edelman

The launch of Edelman's Trust Barometer research at the World Economic Forum in Davos every January is one of the few times that the public relations profession takes center stage at a global gathering, and this year's research was presented in front of an audience of 170 communicators and other interested parties, with the findings creating a somber atmosphere for the discussion that followed.

The conversation featured a global panel of business and journalistic leaders, moderated by Alyson Shontell, editor-in-chief and chief content officer at Fortune. Other participants were:

• Nikki Haley, vice chair, Edelman Public & Government Affairs
• Takeshi Niinami, president and CEO, Suntory Holdings
• Brad Smith, vice chair and president, Microsoft
• Gillian Tett, provost, King's College, Cambridge, and columnist, Financial Times
• Dolf van den Brink, CEO and chairman, Heineken

PRovoke Media's initial coverage of the Trust Barometer focused on the emergence of“grievance” as a driving force in the global lack of trust, and grievance was the main thrust of CEO Richard Edelman's remarks as he summarized the research findings-drawn from 33,000 people in 28 countries.

Worldwide Grievance

Looking at the research as a whole, two-thirds of respondents are consistently unhappy with their current condition, pessimistic about the future, and are convinced that all major institutions-government, business or media-are part of the problem, rather than part of a potential solution.

Edelman told the audience that the preconditions for grievance start with a lack of belief in a better future-only 30% of people across 28 countries believe that their families will be better off in the next generation.“Not a single Western democracy over 30%. France, Japan, 10%,” he said, pointing to startling levels of pessimism in many developed markets,

“Two-thirds today believe that business, government, and media leaders lie to us for their own ends. And two-thirds say, I cannot rely on news. I can't differentiate between disinformation and news.”

As a result,“61% of people now have grievance against business, government, and the wealthy. Among those people, 20% are highly aggrieved. Two-thirds say they are discriminated against, including 50% of whites in the United States. Grievance is universal. It is across gender. It is across income, age groups, and race.

“The scariest statistic of all,” according to Edelman:“40% of our respondents believe in hostile activism as a means of curing grievance. Literally, 20% endorse violence as a means to an end. And it's 53% of 18 to 35s. This is a game changer. This is not business as usual. This is a highly aggrieved world, and it's global.

Pointing to the shooting of a United Healthcare executive in New York in December, Edelman said:“Grievance makes society dysfunctional. It blocks innovation, it causes conflict, it makes government and business unable to work together, and it creates a complete social dysfunction.”

Anger at the Rich, and Capitalism Itself

One statistic that should worry corporate leaders: more than half of respondents now say capitalism does not work.

And the numbers are significantly higher among the aggrieved. Trust in business drops 30% among the highly aggrieved. And there's huge suspicion of innovation.“Only 30% trust use of AI by businesses, among the highly aggrieved.”

This conveys a different message than previous iterations of the Baromete, which suggested that business was the go-to institution when problems needed fixing, the only institution (among government, media, and NGOs) seen both as competent and ethical. But today, Edelman says, business“cannot any longer be the default solution on societal issues. Business leaders lack the trust, and they lack the authority, because of a huge drop in perceived ethics among the highly aggrieved.”

What do the highly aggrieved want from business?“Let's start at the top. We want good-paying jobs. We do not want to fall behind. It is your job to make us competitive. We want affordable products.

Two CEOs on panel, Niinami and van den Brink are based in countries-Japan and the Netherlands respectively-with particularly low levels of trust and high levels of grievance.

Said Niinami, addressing the economic malaise that has plagued Japan for decades.“During the deflation, I think the corporates increased the dividends, there were buybacks, and they lowered the ratio of labor against the profits. So we totally lost the trust among people. The government didn't support the people to be able to get higher wages.”

And as new technologies have come into the workplace, business did not invest in upskilling or training“so people are left behind,” As a result, he said, businesses will need to work together to resolve long-term problems.”

The long-term perspective was shared by van den Brink:“Heineken is still a family-run business, many generations over 160 years. I think therefore we have a slightly longer term perspective of thinking in generations,” he said.

“It feels to me personally also like a final wake-up call, that we better start addressing this systemically, otherwise it really gets even darker than it already is. When such a large portion of society is anxious, feels disempowered, and is pessimistic about the future, that's very dangerous.”

“And so the most important word that comes to mind is hope. Somehow we need to restore hope that the future can be better. And as business, our role is to bring economic optimism back.”

To do that, he said, business needs to re-engage with society.“We need to speak up. We need to re-engage. We need to communicate, not just internally with our people, with society. And it feels awkward, because it has not happened for a long time. And initially, audiences won't be that receptive.”

In particular, he said,“We need to make the case for capitalism. I believe more than half the people don't believe capitalism is a good thing anymore. I hope I can say with this audience that we don't know a better system. So this is the system that we need to make work. And we need to show that it can bring prosperity for the masses, that it will address the environmental side effects, that it can be fair.

“And how do we do it? By walking the talk. By investing in future growth. But also investing in decarbonizing our business, investing in our people, investing in fair wages. And this whole topic of re-skilling is going to be incredibly important. If our economies can't provide well-paying middle-class jobs, then the bottom will fall out.”

And that, Niinami said, would require a new approach:,“I think the best capitalism has to be indispensable, and the current greedy capitalist should be replaced. We've been talking about the new capitalism for a long time, but we have to take action. The new capitalism, which is based on the goal for business to become indispensable, supported by society.”

Will AI Increase Anxiety

Even among low grievance respondents, only 50% say they are comfortable with the use of artificial intelligence; among hight-grievance groups, just 29% trust business. It is clear that AI has the potential to exacerbate the economic anxiety causing the decline in trust.

“There are certain technologies, like electricity, that really become a general purpose technology,” said Brad Smith, vice chair and president, Microsoft.“And they transform every part of the economy, which means they unleash productivity growth much more than typical technologies, but they also unleash much more transformative change.

“The industrial countries of the world in particular are going to be in desperate need of productivity growth. And AI offers, I would argue, the biggest source of productivity growth since the 1890s, when electricity started to spread across many economies.”

But the downside, he says, is disruption, especially because the computer and digital revolution in recent decades has automated low-paying jobs for people with less education far more than high-paying jobs, and business needs to understand and acknowledge the potential downside.

“If we don't get skilling right, if we don't think through the sociology of all of this, I think it risks undermining people's trust even more. What's needed between government and business is that we create innovation, but we don't also create a ton of job loss. We're hearing this talk about wage concerns, about job mobility concerns. It creates tension.”

Gen Z Grievances

“The younger generation in particular,” Niimani said,“have lost lots of opportunities. We have to change the total social package to be more kind to the younger generation.”

Younger respondents to the survey were more likely to express high levels of grievance, and were the most likely to endorse deliberate disinformation, property damage, and even violence against political foes as acceptable responses to their feeling of disenfranchisement.

Which makes it critical for companies to communicate with Gen Z and subsequent generations in ways they trust.

“We've heard a lot about what we don't trust in institutions,” said Tett.“We've not heard a lot about what we do trust. And I would argue, on a practical basis, everyday basis, there's one thing that Gen Z does trust, which is its own tribe and its peer group.”

Tett, who trained as a cultural anthropologist, said she had recently been involved in anthropological studies around trust, including the way Gen Z consumes information.

When Gen Z reads newspapers, the anthropologists realized“they read the headlines first, then they read the comments, and only after that do they actually read the content. What's going on is essentially Gen Z's looking at peer groups online for validation.”

That has implications for media and journalsts, obviously, but also for business communicators.

“There are two options. You can either say, that is ridiculous, I as an important leader should have the right to tell everyone else what to do. They should listen to me and trust me, and if they don't, that's too bad. Or you can accept reality and say, this is how social interaction should be and we have to live with that.”

“Upskilling” and Other Priorities

“From 1980 to 2000, employer investments in employee skilling increased,” said Smith. And most of it was because PCs were going into the workplace and people didn't know how to use them. So employers spent the money to train their employees. But by the year 2000, people knew how to use this stuff. And so you've seen for 25 years now, employer investments in training stagnate and then decline.”

“And we're going to need to invest in new skills. And employers can do a huge amount for their people by embracing that. I think in the tech sector, we have a lot we can do, but we need governments and NGOs. We're gonna need government efforts to really encourage this. And I think NGOs play this critical role in increasing the scale.”

That narrative resonated with van den Brink.“When you look back to the last 20, 30 years, with the accession of China and Eastern Europe to the World Trade Organization, there was a huge influx of labor into global business, which is one reason why salaries have been held back for 20, 25 years” he said.“But that is changing. We are going from an era of abundance to an era of scarcity. Already in the Netherlands you start seeing that happening.

“And it is having an impact on salaries. We see salaries in our collective labor agreements now going up faster than executive salaries.

“But with AI, how do we make sure it augments human skills rather than replace them? I think applying this bottom-up is incredibly important. Probably the perfect way to go about it in our company, is to really make this available to as many people as possible. Even if we don't know how it will be used. So we have the first wave of 10,000 people who have access now to dedicated AI tools, to help them, to support them, to facilitate them, to get rid of the mundane so that they can lean into the more meaningful stuff.”

Build Trust, Unlock Hope

Smith offered a perspective on the issue that begins with empathy.“One thing that is generalizable across every one of us is to start by trying to better understand better why different people feel the way they do,” he said.“Everybody feels aggrieved, but the thing I find fascinating when you talk to groups is they feel aggrieved in different ways and for different things.

“And when you listen to them, you learn that their grievances are moving into reality. It's not just real to them. The problems they're dealing with are real.

“Leaders need to actually acknowledge the problem. I think one can move too fast to say I have an answer for that. People need to feel heard, they need to be understood, and they need leaders of institutions to acknowledge what we might have done to help contribute to the problems they are experiencing.

“I think ultimately the key to rebuilding trust is frankly, maybe talk a little bit less, do a little bit more, and perhaps most importantly, under-promise and over-deliver. Over-promising and under-delivering is not going to be a solution. And so it's going to take time, I think,”

Business, which has grown comfortable with a leadership role, needs to work together with other institutions.“There are absolutely essential roles for the various institutions. This is not a business-only game. For the first time in five years, I can report that there's a big role for NGOs. NGOs had been crowded out by business taking on societal issues or by political criticism and NGOs have put their heads down.

“That time is over. NGOs need to stand up and lead, to be a unifying force that brings us together.”

Finally, Edelman drew a contrast between Germany and Singapore, both democracies, both major players in the global economy.“Germany has 69% grievance, 41% trust. Singapore has 39% grievance, 65% trust. If German trust in institutions can rise to the level of Singapore, then we get to the place of economic optimism and possibility. We see a doubling in economic optimism if there's trust in institutions. So trust becomes the key to unlock hope.”

MENAFN23012025000219011063ID1109121892