Good morning,
Trust is seen as the “new currency for business.” So, does your company have it? And if not, can you earn it?
Harvard Business Review’s virtual conference on Monday convened CEOs and industry experts to explore the future of business and ideas in management. Trust and generative A.I. were themes that came up again and again.
“I think it is our job to earn trust with our consistent actions over a significant period of time,” Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok, told Adi Ignatius, editor in chief of HBR. “And we should have the patience to do that.”
It's no mystery why trust is top of mind at TikTok: Lawmakers are pushing to examine TikTok’s ties to China and its consumer data privacy and security practices. The app has been banned on U.S. government mobile devices. Chew will testify on March 23 before the House Energy and Commerce Committee regarding data security practices. "We've invested a huge amount of money, effort, and time to build and make sure that there's substantial safeguards around whatever concerns people may have," Chew said.
TikTok was the most downloaded app in 2021, and in the same year earned $4 billion in revenue, mostly from advertising, Bloomberg reported. An August 2022 report by Pew Research Center found 67% of teens in the U.S. use TikTok.
“The majority of our revenue today is still coming from advertising,” said Chew, the former CFO of ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok. He took on his current role in May 2021. The best-performing ads on TikTok are the “ones that are organic to the conversation that the users are having,” he said. A recent report by advertising analytics firm Pathmatics by Sensor Tower found that, among social media platforms, U.S. companies’ advertising spend on TikTok is up 62% from Q3 2022 to $2.1 billion in Q4 2022.
Regarding ChatGPT, and its application to TikTok, a possible avenue is “instead of having to film the video yourself, are there tools that can help you create a video or express itself in a much more automated way?” he said.
“I think a lot of companies are investing a lot of effort into this,” Chew, said. But with any new technology, you have to make the pros and the cons transparent, and make sure that you're mitigating risk, he said.
In a separate conversation with Ignatius, former CEO of IBM Ginni Rometty shared her thoughts on ChatGPT. “I think the most important issue right now, and a lesson to be learned, certainly from my experience with Watson—is the world going to trust the technology?” said Rometty who spent nearly 40 years at IBM, and from 2012 to 2020 served as its CEO.
How can you build trust in new technology? “Watching the upside and downside, putting in guard rails so that people understand when to use it and when not based on how mature it is, and being explainable and transparent—knowing what trained it,” she said. Rometty is author of the new book, Good Power.
Trust should seemingly be a central theme for companies handling consumer data and when creating new tech that could potentially replace human creativity.
For more on how trust is shaping the future of business, and how business leaders can earn, retain, and strengthen stakeholder trust, subscribe to my colleague Eamon Barrett's weekly newsletter, The Trust Factor. You can read his latest newsletter here.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
