5 lessons: How leading brands are harnessing trust and AI
Earlier this year, Brand Finance launched the Global 500 2026 report at Davos, during the World Economic Forum. At the launch session, how leading brands are harnessing trust and AI to drive growth, create value, and deliver meaningful impact was examined
How are leading brands harnessing trust and AI to drive growth, create value, and deliver meaningful impact? (Image source: © 123rf 123rf)
The report, produced in partnership with Infosys, reveals the strongest brands of the year.
Key insights and takeaways
Here are the key insights and takeaways from those sessions.
- Brand as a strategic asset
- Trust in the age of AI
- AI for real-world impact
- Enabling decision-making at scale, from inventory management to personalised customer engagement.
- Driving societal impact, such as AI tools for smallholder farmers that provide crop diagnostics in native languages and actionable advice.
- Supporting operational efficiency, including audit, tax, advisory, and cross-functional optimisation.
- Human-centric innovation
- The fundamentals remain
Brand remains a critical driver of business growth and long-term value creation. Beyond logos or campaigns, strong brands enhance trust, reputation, and economic performance.
On average, the brands in the Brand Finance Global 500 represent one-fifth of total enterprise value. Stock market analysis also shows that the top 100 brands in the study outperform their peers in the MSCI World index by at least 20% on shareholder yield, return on equity and operating margin.
Introducing Brand Finance’s Trust Framework, we see brands that embed trust across relational, functional, and principled dimensions and consider temporal and geographic factors are best positioned to maintain credibility.
Trust is emerging as a key differentiator for brands in an AI-enabled world. Whether AI builds or erodes trust depends significantly on how it is designed, deployed and governed, with stakeholders from CEOs to employees to consumers varying significantly in their current readiness to adopt and trust AI-enabled content and experiences.
Alignment with brand values, governance frameworks and ethical standards are key.
AI adoption is moving from experimentation to applications that deliver measurable business and societal outcomes.
Examples include:
AI is most effective when integrated end-to-end across organisations rather than siloed, ensuring coordinated impact and maximising value creation.
AI complements human capability rather than replacing it. Its adoption relies on leadership direction, upskilling, and a clearly articulated purpose. Successful organisations combine AI with human oversight to maintain trust, prevent bias, and ensure decisions are driven by considerations of both economic value and brand values.
While AI accelerates change, the core principles of brand building remain unchanged: brands must be relevant, differentiated, and guided by clear values. When applied responsibly, AI enhances these fundamentals, creating trust, driving growth, and supporting long-term value creation.