Opportunity, Trust and the Quiet Shift Few Are Talking About

As the conversation around AI and technology accelerates, most attention is on what new tools can do. Faster production, lower cost, reduced friction. However, there’s potentially less attention paid to what this does to trust and where future commercial opportunities might actually lie.

Digital platforms

A Reuters investigation late in 2025 showed that Meta internally estimated that around 10% of its advertising revenue was linked to scams, prohibited goods and fraudulent activity. That equates to roughly $16 billion in a single year.

$16bn. Think about that for a moment.

The same documents suggested that Meta platforms were serving billions of high-risk ads every day, with enforcement thresholds set so high that much of that activity remained commercially viable.

According to the investigation, Meta only bans advertisers when its systems are at least 95 percent certain they are committing fraud. If the company is less certain, but still believes an advertiser is likely to be a scammer, it charges higher ad rates instead.

The logic is simple. Make it more expensive and they will stop. But if the return still works, the scams continue. And so does the revenue, only now at a higher margin for Meta.

The human cost is not abstract. It is people losing savings, income and confidence in the systems they use.

AI accelerates the problem

AI changes the economics further. It lowers the effort needed to produce low-quality, low-cost ads, offers and content. Volume rises. Speed rises. Oversight does not. The outcome is predictable.

More content. Lower average quality. More distressed consumers. Less confidence, and greater exposure to fraud along the way. People do not suddenly abandon digital platforms. That is rarely how behaviour changes. Belief erodes gradually. Scrolling continues, but with more caution and less faith.

Over time, that matters. The issue is not whether digital platforms still work. It is whether they remain environments people trust.

Meanwhile, in the physical world

Now look at a very different set of numbers.

Waterstones reported profit of £32.8 million, up from roughly £12 million the year before. Revenue passed £528 million, with growth driven largely by physical shops. Eight new branches opened in 2024. Four closed. The year ended with 317 bookshops.

Bookshops. Of all things.

Waterstones has not succeeded by chasing speed or convenience. It has gone the other way. Fewer titles. Human curation. Physical spaces. Knowledgeable people talking about books.

That approach does more than create goodwill. When customers trust the judgement behind what is being offered, they are willing to pay for it, and to keep coming back.

This is not about nostalgia or rejecting digital channels. Waterstones uses online effectively. But the growth is anchored in places where trust is easier to form and easier to see. A business built around consistency, judgement and trust.

What the numbers tell us

Put these two stories together and a pattern starts to appear. Large digital platforms are designed to optimise for volume. Risk is tolerated if it can be managed. Trust becomes secondary because it is harder to measure and slower to monetise. In more constrained models, judgement cannot be avoided. Trust is not a by-product. It is what the business runs on.

As AI increases the amount of content competing for attention, credibility becomes more valuable – not less. People do not stop using untrusted systems overnight. They simply start weighting their choices differently. Over time, value follows belief.

The implication

When the world feels so unsettled, opportunity rarely sits in obvious places. If trust continues to thin out in high-volume digital environments, growth will favour businesses designed to earn belief rather than attempt to grow past it.

For founders and senior leaders, this is not a question of online versus offline. It is a question of design. If trust is becoming the scarce resource, business models need to be built around creating it. The numbers suggest opportunity may already be moving.

The real risk is realising that after others have acted.