The Edelman Trust Barometer: From Innovation Anxiety via Grievance to Insularity
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer is out. What do its results mean from a #CX angle? Based on the trajectory from Innovation Anxiety (2024) to Grievance (2025) and finally Insularity (2026), we can see five critical impacts on Customer Experience (CX). The data suggests that CX strategies must pivot from purely functional service delivery to acting as engines of trust, fairness, and local connection, i.e., become more strategic (pun intended). The Shift to “Polynational” CX: Localizing the Experience The 2026 report identifies a sharp rise in “Geopolitical Insularity,” where consumers (i.e., people) significantly distrust foreign companies compared to domestic ones. Source: Edelman Trust Barometer 2026, p6 Impact: Global brands cannot rely on a one-size-fits-all customer journey anymore. They must adopt a “polynational” model where the brand feels deeply local. Actionable CX Strategy: To overcome the distrust of foreign entities, companies must demonstrate long-term commitment to local communities. This includes hiring customer support staff from the local community (38% say this earns trust) and investing in long-term local projects (27%) rather than just transactional interactions. MyPoV: Zoho does something very right with its strategy of transnational localism. Many companies, including enterprise software vendors should have a hard look at this book. AI Implementation Must Be “Vetted” and “Inclusive” The reports reveal a deep divide in how customers perceive technology. In 2024, acceptance of innovation hinged on it being “vetted by scientists” and understood by the public. By 2026, a new fear emerged: 54% of low-income respondents believe they will be “left behind” by generative AI rather than realize its benefits. Source: Edelman Trust Barometer 2026, p12 Impact: Implementing AI in...
Beyond GDPR: Is MyTerms the New Standard for Enforceable Personal Data Agreements?
The news IEE just released standard 7012-2025 for machine readable personal privacy terms, nicknamed MyTerms. MyTerms covers interactions and agreements between individuals and service providers they interact with on a network. It defines a way for personal privacy requirements to be expressed as standard-form contractual agreements. MyTerms is intended to replace today’s “notice and consent” pattern with a standardized, machine-readable contract handshake between an individual and a service provider. The standard considers individuals true first parties who can proffer privacy terms as contractual terms, typically through an automated agent acting on their behalf. The system relies on a neutral, non-business entity that hosts a bounded set of standard-form privacy agreements. These agreements are designed to be understandable and usable in practice by humans and by machines. They must be available in plain-language human-readable form, maintain legally meaningful wording, and also exist in machine-readable structured formats with stable identifiers so software agents can select and process them reliably. When an individual, or their agent, proposes one of these agreements to a service provider, this service provider has a deliberately constrained set of responses to allow model scalability. The service provider may accept the proposed agreement, offer one alternative agreement from the same bounded roster, or reject the proposed agreement. The standard does not expect open-ended negotiation beyond that single alternative choice. If the service provider accepts, the agreement is recorded so that both sides retain matching, immutable copies, including contextual metadata such as time, date, and location, to support later retrieval, audits, and dispute resolution. In parallel, service providers are required to publicly disclose which of the standard agreements they...
Flipping the math: How AI changes Build vs. Buy
For the longest time, companies have been trapped by enterprise software vendors. First by shrink-wrapped software packages. Then by SaaS offerings. Both situations led to what one even in a SaaS world can call shelfware – although these days the shelf is a virtual one instead of a physical one. Buyers still get enticed to purchase more capabilities than they need, which leads to them paying more than necessary while often using software packages that offer overlapping capabilities. One of the promises that SaaS started with, was to end this. Sadly, it looks like this promise was not kept. And this is no wonder; after all vendors want to be sticky. And they need to have increasing revenues. This means that they need to offer an ever-increasing number of capabilities, aka features, to warrant their pricing and eventually regular price increases. Combined with the frequently used strategy of offering related capabilities, i.e., seats for an adjacent software that is not yet needed by a customer, this led to two things: bloat and shelfware. Both go at the expense of the enterprise buyer. Since the dawn of packaged software, the argument to buy, i.e., to voluntarily step into this trap, is the same: Buying is cheaper than building. Which probably was correct. Buying from a specialist was the logical choice. Engineering talent was, and still is, scarce. Building software includes a lengthy process of requirements engineering, years of development and ultimately never-ending maintenance. Just that most of this is true for most implementations of purchased enterprise software, too. And the buying process is arguably broken. Need identification is often done...
Is RevOps the New CRM?
The Lost Strategy: What CRM Was Supposed to Be CRM at its very origin, was a strategy. With the advent of systems that support the execution of this strategy, the term more and more got shifted to describe a system. This shift can get seen in the words of CRM Godfather Paul Greenberg. His pre-2009 definition of CRM was “a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a system and a technology designed to improve human interaction in a business environment.” This changed to “Customer Relationship Management is a technology and system that sustains sales, marketing and customer service activities. It is designed to capture and interpret customer data, both structured and unstructured, and to sustain the management of the business side of customer related operations. CRM technology automates processes and workflows and helps organize and interpret data to support a company in engaging its customers more effectively” in acceptance of this change (emphasis by me). These days, people often even mean a sales force automation system, when they say “CRM”. In another dimension, the systems themselves more and more turned into systems of record. Implementations often were management-oriented as opposed to team-oriented, which led to increasing dissatisfaction and the creation of new terms and categories like social CRM, system of engagement, customer data platform, customer engagement, customer experience management, and so on. There is much more, but in consequence, CRM lost both, the “C” and the “R”. CRM turned from a strategy into a glorified rolodex and a tool to manage teams, in particular sales teams, instead of helping organizations and teams to manage and improve the customer...