More About Rachel Botsman

Rachel Botsman is a thought leader on trust in the modern world, distilling complex ideas into clear content, giving her audience members the tools to understand trust and why it’s important for every aspect of life.

Rachel spent the early years of career working as the Alliance for a Healthier Generation Director for the Clinton Foundation, and a Non-Executive Board Member of the NRMA.

She was a former trust fellow at the Said Business School, University of Oxford, where she designed and taught the world’s first MBA courses on the ‘collaborative economy’ and ‘trust in the digital age’.

She is a frequent media contributor and has written about trust, AI, the future of work, tech leaders, the pros and cons of technology, data, and innovation. She is also the host of Trust Issues, a podcast that explores trust through the lenses of politics, business, popular culture, and psychology, and appears on the BBC, CNN, ABC, and NPR.

She has published two books to date. The first one was What’s Mine is Yours (2010) where Rachel introduces the concept of ‘collaborative consumption’ to reshape business, consumerism, and the way we live. This was followed up in 2017 with Who Can You Trust, which looks at how we can survive social transformations and how companies, institutions, governments, and leaders can regain our trust.

RACHEL BOTSMAN | AWARDS

Rachel’s expertise has seen her be the recipient of a plethora of honours and awards over the years, including:

– Top 10 Influential Voices in the UK 2020 by LinkedIn

– Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum

– Top 100 Most Creative in Business by the Fast Company

– World’s Top 30 Management Thinkers by Thinkers50

– Named in the InStyle Women of the Year List

– Named in Time’s ‘10 Ideas That Will Change the World’

– Breakthrough Idea Award by Thinkers50

– HR Most Influential Thinkers by HR Magazine

– Top 20 Speakers in the World by Monocle

– Business Podcast of the Year at the British Podcast Awards

– Finalist for the ‘Change’ Book of the Year at the Business Book Awards

– Finalist for Interview of the Year at the British Podcast Awards

– Finalist at the CEO Book Awards

– A Finalist at Webby’s for Best Independent Newsletter

RACHEL BOTSMAN | CORPORATE CAREER

Rachel is a highly sought-after keynote speaker on a range of topics, including:

– Rethinking Trust at Work

– Trust and the Future of Work

– Designing and Innovating With Trust

– AI’s Trust Problem

– The Importance of Trust in Hybrid Working

– Trusting Leadership in Uncertain Times

RACHEL BOTSMAN | KEYNOTE SPEAKING TOPICS

Rachel Botsman – Leading with Trust in Uncertain Times

When the world feels complex and fast-moving, trust becomes a powerful source of clarity and confidence. It gives people the courage to take smart risks, collaborate across teams, and lean into change instead of resisting it. Yet despite how often we use the word, trust is still clouded by myths. In this keynote, Rachel deconstructs those misconceptions and invites audiences to rethink trust as something they can actively shape.

With her ‘Risk–Trust Lens’ framework, she shows why the balance between risk and trust is the hallmark of adaptive leadership and shares practical tools leaders can use to build cultures where people feel safe, supported, and ready to step into the unknown.

Rachel Botsman – Trust by Design: What Makes Innovation Stick

Why do some innovations fail while others succeed? The difference is rarely the technology; it’s whether people trust it enough to make the leap. Every breakthrough depends on what Rachel calls a Trust Leap: the decision to embrace a new way of working, creating, or connecting. Yet too often, innovators obsess over features and functions and overlook the trust conditions that truly determine adoption.

Drawing on 15 years of work with Fortune 500 companies and start-ups, Rachel shares her ‘Trust Leap’ framework, showing why designing for trust is as essential as designing for usability or beauty. Through stories that span from historical inventions to today’s disruptive start-ups, she reveals how trust is the hidden design layer that allows ideas to take root and grow.

Rachel Botsman –  Rethinking the New Rules of Trust & AI

AI is rapidly reshaping how we make decisions, create, work, and even trust one another. But here’s the challenge: most of the questions about trust and AI are framed incorrectly. The real issue is not whether people should trust AI, but how we design AI systems to be genuinely trustworthy.

Rachel uses her ‘Trust Shift’ framework to show how every major leap in history has required new forms of trust, and why AI marks a fundamentally different moment that forces us to rethink the rules altogether.

Rachel’s previous speaking engagements include:

– Rethinking People and Values in a Changing World at the 2021 Oslo Business Forum

– In Technology We Trust at the 2018 World Economic Forum

– The Currency of Trust at the 2019 Digital Life Design

RACHEL BOTSMAN | TED TALKS

Rachel Botsman has given two TED talks that have been watched over 5 million times. Her first talk in 2010, The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, saw her explore how digital technologies are reshaping collaboration and trust, redefining how we live, work, and consume.

Her second talk, We’ve Stopped Trusting Institutions and Started Trusting Strangers in 2016 delves into the profound shift occurring in our understanding of trust, exploring the ways in which it is being redefined in the modern world.

RACHEL BOTSMAN | CLIENTS

Accenture, the Drucker Forum, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Salesforce, the World Economic Forum, the World of Business Forum, Xero

Call +44 1753 439 289 or email Great British Speakers now to book internationally respected speaker on trust, Rachel Botsman for your next corporate event.

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