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Perspectives: Trust and leadership in the age of AI
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This episode features best-selling author, Malcolm Gladwell, in conversation with Barry O’Byrne, CEO, International Wealth & Premier Banking, HSBC. Together they explore how AI is reshaping human behaviour and the signals we use to decide who and what to trust as humans and AI increasingly co-exist.
Watch or listen to find out more.
This episode was recorded on the sidelines of the HSBC Global Investment Summit 2026 in Hong Kong. Find out more https://www.business.hsbc.com/en-gb/campaigns/global-investment-summit
Disclaimer: Views of external guest speakers do not represent those of HSBC.
Copyright © Malcolm Gladwell 2026, All Rights Reserved
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast Series
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to HSBC Global Viewpoint, the podcast series that brings together business leaders and industry experts to explore the latest global insights, trends, and opportunities.
00:00:13
Speaker
Make sure you're subscribed to stay up to date with new episodes. Thanks for listening, and now onto to today's show.
AI's Impact on Trust at HSBC Summit
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to HSBC's Perspectives, and thank you for tuning in. We're joining today from HSBC's Global Investment Summit here in Hong Kong. And one of the questions that's been coming up quite a lot is the impact on AI on trust. I'm Barry
Malcolm Gladwell's Introduction
00:00:37
Speaker
O'Byrne. I'm the CEO for our international wealth and premier banking business, and I'm delighted to be joined today by award-winning author Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm, welcome.
00:00:46
Speaker
Thank you. So Malcolm, I'm going to start with a question on AI and what it has confirmed about human behavior and maybe what it has changed in our thinking as well.
Technological Adoption vs. Understanding
00:00:57
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One of the things that we know from looking at previous technological innovations is that the pace of technological adoption is much faster than the pace of technological understanding.
00:01:09
Speaker
So you know the telephone was invented in 1870-something. People don't really understand what it's for until the 1920s. The telephone industry spends decades trying to convince people not to gossip on their telephone. You know, so that's a kind of dramatic example.
00:01:25
Speaker
dramatic example but Time and time again, you could look at these innovations and you realize we don't figure them out as human beings, what we want from them, how we react to them, until sometimes decades after their introduction.
00:01:39
Speaker
I would argue, for example, that social media is still something that we're still working out and evolving our understanding of what we want from it, what it is, what role it plays in our life. It's much too early to tell. yeah I am struck, as always, by um how open people are to technological transformation.
00:01:58
Speaker
You know, we're... I keep expecting there to be some kind of real backlash, not the kind of, you know, complex discussion that we have, but... And do you think that's a generational thing?
00:02:11
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I think that we have gotten over the last generation or so, so used to these technological upheavals, yep that they've become almost part of the scenery of modern life.
00:02:24
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That we're almost more alarmed by when things don't change than when they do, which would be very different from, you know, previous centuries or even previous generations.
00:02:36
Speaker
When I was a 12-year-old, my father imagined that the world I would grow up into would resemble his own. There's no chance whatsoever that I would have that expectation of my own children. Interesting. And and um one of the things that maybe yeah we are very focused on is trust as an organization. And that's something that you know we're very keen in terms of building that trust our customers have in in us.
00:03:01
Speaker
I guess, again, when you think of ai and you think of more and more being done online, how does that dynamic change? you Are there new symbols or signs of trust or things that potentially could mislead us?
The Nature of Trust and Performance
00:03:15
Speaker
We have an expectation that trust is correlated with performance. that if we do a better job at something, more efficient, faster, whatever cheaper, that people will trust it more. And that's just not true.
00:03:30
Speaker
Trust is independent of performance. People trust things for a much more complicated set of psychological reasons. um they They're looking for um someone who shares their values, who articulates some sense of purpose.
00:03:45
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who ah who knows them personally, who i could go on, who who listens to them. These are all things that are separate from, not and not entirely separate from performance, but they some overlap, but they exist in a separate kind of bubble. But do you think performance is taken as a given?
00:04:03
Speaker
I think the mistake that people make with AI is to believe that if I radically improve improve the performance of a task yeah using AI, that it will follow that people people's trust in my institution, my procedure, my specialty, what have you, will increase. And I think that's not true.
00:04:27
Speaker
Do you think there are new signs? So do you think there's specific elements that we as humans, consumers will look for? I imagine that as more and more things become kind of automated,
00:04:42
Speaker
or digitized or move online, then the kind of need for some meaningful human
Human Interaction in the Age of Automation
00:04:49
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interaction will grow. And we've already seen this, right? This conference that we're at, 25 years ago, conferences like this didn't exist.
00:04:58
Speaker
You didn't get thousands of people to come together. you know They were much smaller, they were less frequent, they weren't the centerpiece of professional activity. This is a reaction to the ways, to the extent to which other parts of our everyday life have become depersonalized, right?
00:05:16
Speaker
So I think that that principle that we're going to compensate for what we can't find in an automated or digitized experience is going to become even more real. And if you bring that into the business context and decisions that customers make in terms of the organizations that they interact with, that they trust, what is it that leaders need to look out for in terms of the criteria that are driving those trust decisions? Yeah.
00:05:49
Speaker
So we haven't in the age of AI gone through a crisis. So what I want to know is what happens when markets collapse or you know there's some major economic catastrophe in one of the Western nations or does people's attitudes towards depersonalized experiences change?
00:06:11
Speaker
Do they need more of a human interaction when things get difficult? You cannot generalize about human experience based on good times. Good times tell you very little.
00:06:23
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Difficult times won't tell you something about about... And if I were to push you, you have a theory in terms of what may happen during that crisis? I think people are going to grow a little more skeptical of over-reliance on tools like AI when there is some perception of a crisis. Think about the way somebody responds to getting an unfavorable medical diagnosis.
00:06:44
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You're told you have cancer. What do you do? Well, what that typically does, it sets off a whole new round of tests. You get another. But mostly see what it does is it sets off a whole new round of conversations.
00:06:56
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right You start searching for some kind of provider, or some person yeah who can hold your hand and guide you through this difficult experience. So it's not that you say, you know, I want to get four extra scans of my tumor and we'll go from there. No, you start looking for a human interaction to guide you through that difficult time. So that's, I would imagine something analogous. Along those lines. Along those lines, yeah.
00:07:21
Speaker
If we touch on tipping points and they they're defined by systems and environments, it sounds simple, but they're still incredibly difficult to predict. Why is that the case?
00:07:33
Speaker
Well, they would have to be difficult to predict. I mean, the whole nature of any kind of nonlinear phenomenon, anything that's where small changes are having very large effects, is that they are, by definition, mysterious and unpredictable.
00:07:46
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We think as human beings, in linear terms, we think there should be some constant relationship between inputs and outputs. And the whole point of an epidemic is that there is an an irregular relationship between input and output. That is always going to be, comes as a surprise to us. It's just not the way our brains are are wired.
00:08:05
Speaker
I'm going to go back to the, maybe the the notion of crisis and and shock that you you touched on. As leaders work through various different crises, what should they never compromise on?
00:08:19
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I always say that people should should hold their ideas loosely and their values firmly. um think that's a useful guide for a crisis, is that it is not it is not a a shameful thing to change your opinion or your mind or your approach or your strategy or your tactics as the occasion demands it.
00:08:43
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It is problematic to change your values. You need to stand for something that is relevant and meaningful in both good times and bad, right? But your ideas should be malleable.
00:08:54
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But there are things that should also change quickly. um And how do leaders show the openness to doing that and doing it at pace? Yeah. And that's one of the the the the the hardest of all challenges of leadership.
00:09:08
Speaker
A lot depends on the kind of capital that a leader has built up in good times, easier times. You know, i've you know i've ah one of the things that I will often found fascinating about um scandals involving politicians is that different people are judged differently for the same behavior.
00:09:29
Speaker
We allow some people to get away with kind of questionable activities and others not. And the question is, why do we have, it seems like a double standard. And the answer is, it's not a double standard. It's that we're willing to forgive some people if they have built up some residue of social of capital with us, whether whether they, in other respects, have won our trust or admiration. We're not willing to extend that same courtesy to someone who has squandered their social capital over the years.
00:09:56
Speaker
So we, the same I think is true of leaders, that leaders put goodwill in the bank. And if they have enough in the bank to draw on in hard times, it enables them to enables them to ah to survive and succeed.
Diversity and Curiosity in Teams
00:10:10
Speaker
Interesting.
00:10:11
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of things we think about a lot and we're focused on is the whole notion of curiosity, intellectual curiosity, openness to to change. And you often find individuals will and and colleagues will say, yes, of course I'm curious, of course I'm open. um But how do you ensure it goes beyond potential lip service and it's real in an organization? Yeah.
00:10:37
Speaker
I mean, there's a million answers to that, but one you know, one of one of the kind of principle um foundations of supporting curiosity is having sufficient aye diversity in teams. By diversity I mean that in the broadest sense of the word, that if you have people who come from a wide variety of backgrounds and have a wide variety of intellectual perspectives and different experiences and are different ages and then you it becomes a lot easier for people to open up to new ideas, to accept something um new or alien or in some cases threatening, right?
00:11:18
Speaker
Because you it it almost it it sort of normalizes curiosity to be surrounded by people with a wide variety of perspectives. um If everyone shares the same perspective, then the new or the radical idea really is um threatening and easy to kind of push aside.
00:11:37
Speaker
So you know i I was just at a luncheon here organized by um your bank and it was a ah cross-section of people from the industry. And what was fascinating was how many different backgrounds were in the room, right? And this' is that's sort of the one thing this industry has done really, really well and why it is such a dynamic and sense is it is It has a a natural tendency towards and sort of effortless diversity.
00:12:04
Speaker
I think that's ah that's something that should be um emulated by other professions. grace Bring it back a little bit closer to home for a couple of minutes. Our wealth business is one that is huge priority in terms of the opportunity that there for HSBC. Equally, it's an area where we actively question what the impact of AI is going to be.
00:12:28
Speaker
But from a trust perspective and how AI can be an enabler of trust as customers make decisions around their wealth, around their portfolio, any insight you care to to share in that space?
00:12:44
Speaker
Well, I mean, it's a tool and the question is, what is the best way for the professional to use that tool? And so for example, you can imagine that AI could become a way of making the decision-making processes of professionals um more legible to their clients.
00:13:04
Speaker
You know, not all clients want the decision making of their wealth professional to be legible. Some do. For some, knowing how a decision was reached and the evidence that was used to support it is it would be a source of enormous comfort.
00:13:16
Speaker
um And I think AI has the potential to make it easier for professionals to make those kinds of decisions legible. It can also you know be a way of testing ideas that you can we can get a quicker and maybe more accurate sense of where a particular approach lies along the continuum.
00:13:38
Speaker
If I'm entrusting my life savings to someone, I don't think that most of us are ready to assign something that that's so that's that emotionally important
AI in Decision-Making and Trust Dynamics
00:13:48
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to us to a bit of software. So it sounds like we're in ah similar space because i think of this as being amplification rather than replacement. Yes. The relationship that a a client has to a wealth manager is not dissimilar to a relationship a patient has to the doctor.
00:14:06
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That you're not just going to get better. You're going to be heard, you're going to get reassurance, you're going to get comfort.
00:14:17
Speaker
There's a whole range of emotional needs and psychological needs we have as human beings that good professionals satisfy, right? If it was just about getting better, then why wouldn't you just go to wouldn't we just have machines full of pills in in um grocery stores and you would just dispense your medications that way? Well, that's it's not what we want, right? We actually want to have the conversation with the person who who gives us the pill. And I think understanding what that what you do is more than simply the production of a commodified service, but rather you're playing an important role in managing one of the most um one of the most essential, emotional experiences of people's lives.
00:15:01
Speaker
As we look forward, and maybe if I ask you to take out your crystal ball for a minute, and we think about the next five years and how that trust in AI maybe reaches a tipping point in its favor, what do you think it's going to take to define that? What's that moment going to be?
00:15:22
Speaker
I don't think that ah AI moves along the trust dimension. um because I think trust is something that is inherent in human relationships, not in not in technological relationships, A, and B, that the potential for mischief with AI is still so unknown.
00:15:46
Speaker
Trust arises out of it an asymmetry between doing mischief and fixing mischief. We trust somebody you who who puts things right, doesn't mess things up.
00:15:58
Speaker
AI, at the moment at least, does both, right? That's why it's so fascinating and powerful and transformative. But it's not, this is not a recipe for um for inspiring the trust of users.
00:16:11
Speaker
Welcome, Gladwell. Fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today for this edition of HSBC's Perspectives. Thank you. Thank you, Barry. Thank you for joining us at HSBC Global Viewpoint.
00:16:23
Speaker
We hope you enjoyed the discussion. Make sure you're subscribed to stay up to date with new episodes.