The Rise of the Chief Trust Officer
The article in The Stack highlights the shift to an emphasis on trust extends beyond security to data integrity and the entire technology ecosystem.
The role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is evolving in some cases to the title of Chief Trust Officer (CTrO). A role with the focus extending beyond security to encompass data integrity and ensuring trust across the organization’s entire technology ecosystem. The shift is changing reporting lines, from traditionally the CIO to potentially the General Counsel, the Chief Operating Officer, or even the CEO.
The Chief Trust Officer bridges the gap between traditional IT security and customer-facing communication. It is a result of the rapid pace of change in today’s business environment. While emerging technologies like generative AI make organizations more productive and unlock new opportunities, they also introduce new risks, uncertainties, and regulations for organisations to navigate.
This role is particularly vital as businesses collaborate to address threats in a manner that ensures both trust and accountability flow between providers and clients. It can be viewed as more of an external facing job that a typical CISO role. External-facing activities can include customer interaction, industry advocacy, and translating external requirements into actionable internal strategies.
Moving from domain expert to a broader leadership role
Moving from ‘expert’ to ‘orchestrator’ requires a shift in leadership from relying on expertise in one domain to embracing a broader role that aligns efforts across the organization to address complex, cross-functional challenges, such as trust.
Michael Smets, professor of management at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, argues that it is a role aimed at addressing the systemic challenges of trust and ethics that technology-driven environments carry with them. “Whoever fills the role needs to be a strong orchestrator and willing to leave behind their ‘expert’ mindset," he says. "Orchestrators - like conductors of an orchestra - excel at getting different parts of the organization to come together around a particular issue”.
“Getting the entire organization to cohere around one of these critical issues is as difficult as it is important,” he adds. First of all, given the novelty of the role and its wide-ranging remit, CTrOs face the paradox of “having a mandate of transforming everything while having authority over nothing”, as one of my research-participants it once eloquently put.
"Moving from ‘expert’ to ‘orchestrator’ requires a shift in leadership from relying on deep, specialized expertise in one domain to embracing a broader role that integrates and aligns efforts across the organization to address complex, cross-functional challenges, such as trust. This is going to be especially important for CTrOs, as building trust is not something that can rest solely with a single person, team, or department. It requires alignment across the entire organisation.”
The article highlights the increasing interconnectedness of businesses, governments, and individuals, making trust a non-negotiable success factor. Chief Trust Officers are stewards of transparency, ethical behavior, and accountability. In an era of rising regulatory expectations and ethical concerns around AI, organizations that strategically invest in a Chief Trust Officer are better positioned to navigate complexity. By orchestrating security, compliance, and transparency, they foster stakeholder confidence—turning trust from a compliance necessity into a powerful competitive differentiator.
From CISO to CTrO: Rise of the Chief Trust Officer
The Stack
https://www.thestack.technology/chief-trust-officer-rise-enterprise