Authored by Chad Quinn, CEO, Ecosystems
“The currency of the future will be relationships of trust.”
So said Dr. Andreas Heisler. Or Stephen Covey. Or Forbes.com.
No matter. Everyone knows it was Abraham Lincoln who said, “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.”
This explains why, for 30 years, the internet has fueled our inner skeptics—the sudden democratization of AI in 2022 elevated skepticism to an art form. We marvel at the power of artificial intelligence to streamline workflows and accelerate productivity, but we hear the horror stories.
Cheese not sticking to your pizza? Glue it on.
The number of African countries starting with a ‘K’? Zero. Somebody forgot to tell Kenya.
“Geologists Recommend Eating At Least One Small Rock Per Day.” Because they contain minerals, of course. That’s AI quoting The Onion, so it must be true.
Clearly, AI has yet to develop the human judgment and insight needed to recognize satire and nonsense. Hence, hallucination.
Still, businesses are struggling to address AI’s growing pains. In the rush to seize the productivity and self-service advantages of AI, they sacrifice the trust essential to B2B relationships.
Fortunately, trust arbiters are emerging to evaluate and confirm AI-generated claims. They include the Ecosystems Value Validated Seal, stamping AI-generated value propositions with a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
In this place where AI results are sourced and reliable, the seller has a powerful tool for auditing and benchmarking value claims. The buyer organization approves purchases with confidence and has the evidence-based guidance needed to extract full value.
AI-generated content backed by a truthfulness guarantee is worth celebrating. After all, as Honest Abe also said, “AI is going to bend your mind."
Trust: A B2B Essential
AI and analytics are infiltrating every aspect of the marketplace. Businesses are alleviating skills shortages, battling cybercriminals, hurdling the supply-chain barriers that baffle competitors, communicating more efficiently, and instantly adapting product offerings to local demand and changing tastes.
Solutions. Innovation. Higher-order thinking. A fulfilling customer experience. Businesses large and small are trumpeting their capabilities and reaching for the moon.
But there’s a dark side of the moon. As long as AI draws from a pool of questionable data, we are simply automating bad information. Until AI acquires a protective layer of insurance and auditability, B2B transactions will be clouded by mistrust.
Decades of research prove that trust is fundamental to profitability and innovation. I ran across this timeless finding from 2017, published in The Journal of Strategic Information Systems.
“Successful business-to-business (B2B) data exchanges can help firms improve inter-organizational cooperation and operational practices, thereby increasing competitive advantage. However, data exchange quality and trust are not assured.”
Trust is a stronger influence on relationship commitments than distrust, the researchers said, but distrust and trust get equal weight in gauging perceived risk.
More recently, Forrester’s Business Trust Survey, 2023, found that nearly half of B2B buyers make “defensive purchases” more than 70 percent of the time. Fear that the wrong decision will tank their careers drives them to steer clear of risk.
“Trust is the remedy to risk,” wrote Forrester analysts Ian Bruce and Zachary Stone, adding that “trust bridged the gap between a risk-averse buyer and a potential buyer.” When the vendor establishes trust, buyers “are almost twice as likely to recommend that company externally or to pay a premium to work with that company.”
Overlay these findings on AI’s application to B2B relations, and you see the problem. AI can efficiently generate proposals and recommendations, but it can’t assure relevance and accuracy without trusted data and validated results. When trust is absent, buyers derisk, and the decisions go into a deep freeze.
Clearing Value for Takeoff
Sellers are layering automation into their processes, but are systems trained on the right models? Are sellers confident that the outputs are correct? If the sellers aren’t confident, how can the buyer be sure?
B2B vendors who properly harness AI to create fact-based, trustworthy value proposals deserve to be rewarded with a healthy book of business, but every B2B buyer today knows that AI is behind the proposals crossing their desks. All they’re thinking is, “Glue does not belong on pizza.”
More distrust. More risk. More fear. The deal stalls.
Enter the value arbiter. For decades, third-party validation has offered the gold standard of trustworthiness. It’s Better Business Bureau accreditation. Underwriters Laboratories’ safety standards. Allure Best of Beauty Awards. And yes, it’s the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
A value seal signals that the vendor isn’t just blowing smoke or overhyping the product’s miraculous effects. Here, a disinterested entity has certified the claims.
In the digital age, it makes sense that third-party validators are emerging to scrutinize AI-produced results. A dependable broker bridges the trust gap in AI-informed value proposals, holding the vendor accountable and assuring the buyer that these are fair and reasonable results to expect.
As AI takes center stage in business relationships, validation dovetails with Forrester’s Seven Levers of Trust. Its intentional steps (accountability, consistency, competence, dependability, empathy, integrity, and transparency) elevate trust from aspirational to systemized.
And you’ll find that validation is central to at least four of the seven levers:
- Accountability: It’s a two-sided coin. On one side, B2B sellers are the promise keepers, accountable for aligning results with their projections. On the other side, buyers can’t just ignore or misuse the product’s key capabilities and then blame the vendor for underperformance. Validation holds two sets of feet to the fire.
- Dependability: In value proposals, context is king. A midsized food-service supplier doesn’t care how the software performs for giant hotel reservation services. Buyers want to know how they compare to their competitors and industry peers. When they get validated, trustworthy benchmarking in their hands, they’re ready to sculpt strategies that use your product to drive momentum upward.
- Integrity and transparency: Sometimes, promised value doesn’t materialize. AI can’t make bad news disappear, but it can surface problems early for timely remediation. Progressive, customer-obsessed vendors look early and often for flaws and remedies. Transparent, validated AI-informed course corrections show buyers that their trust is being rewarded with sincere make-good efforts.
A Value Validation Solution
Increasingly, buyers are self-serving their value realization. They want the timeliness of tracking progress and outcomes for themselves, without long waits for answers that might or might not address their questions.
But while self-service is a labor-saver for vendors, there’s danger here. DIYers who surface suspicious recommendations will hesitate to apply the vendor’s product. As distrust sets in, any hopes for a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship begin a slow-vanishing act, like the Cheshire Cat fading to a grin.
In this atmosphere, Ecosystems introduces the Value Validated Seal. It’s a warranty assuring that AI value realization outputs meet certain performance benchmarks. The Value Validated Seal provides a multidimensional look at value assertions. It’s designed on the premise that value is not a calculation but an experience.
This expansive, experiential view adds flexibility to the art of expressing value. Buyers are tired of cookie-cutter calculations. Traditional ROI figures remain in play, but astute customers also dig for meaning and impact. They demand benchmarks for performance comparisons to their peers and competitors. They want to see non-monetized value, such as employee satisfaction.
Maybe most importantly, they expect proof that this solution aligns with, and supports their company's strategic objectives.
In this take on value, providers acquire the agility to anticipate customer needs and value auditing acts like underwriting. Actual results from existing customers support a reasonable range of outcomes that buyers can anticipate. Benchmarked road maps send customers along efficient routes toward their strategic aims.
For the customer, a validated digital value experience delivers the power to examine the spectrum of results from multiple angles. Value becomes clear across dimensions of corporate and personal perspectives. The Value Validated Seal provides assurance that the findings are based on solid data and have been audited by the pros. Confidence replaces the fear that paralyzes so many buyers. Their wise investment, they know, will propel the company toward strategic growth.
It all comes down to objectivity. Someone is scrutinizing AI-generated value proposals and claims for accuracy and depth – and it’s not the company whose name is on the buyer’s checks.
Trustworthy AI: 4 Tips
For every step forward in earning trust, artificial intelligence can take it two steps back. Consider these tips for infusing trust into B2B relationships across the digital expanse:
1. Prioritize trust, not more headcount: Providers can’t hire their way into adequately servicing every customer, especially those smaller entities comprising the long tail of the customer base. AI-powered self-service seems like the answer, but digital enablement is not the same as digital trust. A single AI-generated recommendation that customers spot as bogus can undo years of carefully cultivated trust.
2. Go benchmarking: Your customers constitute a cohort of shared interests. How each one experiences your product can reveal valuable lessons for the full community. Start by conducting objective value studies on your flagship solutions. Then, plow the findings into a benchmark database that AI can mine for comparisons and insights.
3. Know your product: Your product can, and should, do many things that address your customer’s unique dilemmas. But can you pinpoint which capabilities are truly driving value? If 20 percent of your product’s functions are steering 80 percent of the customer’s success, it’s time to mine that 20 percent for new opportunities in defining value. Audit the product, deconstruct its capabilities, and understand which functions move the value needle.
4. Bundling. It’s not just for insurance: When your happy, value-achieving DIY customer wants to know what else you have, can your portal issue a cogent recommendation? Understanding all of your products means uncovering their value-added interactions. It’s bundling for better outcomes. AI becomes a prescriptive guide for immediate action when it crafts recommendations from a thorough knowledge of your lineup.
AI for Trusted B2B
AI’s arrival is probably the biggest marketplace disrupter since computers pushed typewriters off our desks. Today, many companies see the race as a contest to adopt AI technology for its productivity and labor-saving prowess.
Running headlong toward the promise of AI only undermines trust. The real race is among the future-forward businesses leveraging AI to build and strengthen trust. They are capturing the power of AI to transform value into an experience felt across diverse dimensions and levels, while also exploring and exploiting the hidden powers of their products.
Value validation is the two-way bridge that crosses and conquers the trust chasm. Contact Ecosystems to learn more about the Value Validated Seal, and prepare to mint the currency of the digital age—relationships forged on trust and burnished by AI.
You can access a PDF version of this blog post here.
