A Trust Crisis Is About to Hit GTM Organisations

A trust crisis is emerging at the intersection of artificial intelligence, content saturation, and evolving buyer behaviour. It's a systemic erosion of confidence in digital interactions, driven by the reality that AI-generated content, from text to video and automated outreach, has become very close to, if not even similar to, authentic human communication. The tools that make our work more efficient are also making it harder for buyers to know what's real and whom they can trust.

This isn't a theoretical problem for the future. For GTM leaders, this trust crisis is already affecting sales velocity. Your buyers are becoming increasingly sceptical of every email, every video call, and every piece of content they encounter. They're questioning whether they're engaging with a real person or an algorithm. That hesitation is showing up in lower engagement rates and higher demands for proof and validation. Adapting your GTM strategy accordingly isn't optional in 2026.

The Impact The Trust Crisis Will Have on GTM

The trust crisis will manifest in measurable ways across your revenue operations. Many sales teams have noticed that response rates to cold outreach are declining. Partly this is due to buyers systematically filtering out messages they assume are automated.

The consequences extend well beyond just competing for attention. Your operational exposure has increased as well. Fraudsters are exploiting the same AI technologies your team uses for legitimate purposes to launch sophisticated attacks that directly target revenue operations. Faking a purchase order to access (physical) goods is not unheard of.

The Flood of AI Content Is Training Buyers to Distrust Everything

The internet is drowning in AI-generated content, and buyers know it. In April 2025, Ahrefs analysed 900,000 newly created webpages and found that 74% contained AI-generated content. When nearly three-quarters of new content involves artificial intelligence in its creation, buyers have learned to approach everything with scepticism. Sales enablement materials, case studies, email sequences, and social media content are increasingly AI-assisted or AI-generated. According to the same Ahrefs study, 87% of content marketers now report using AI to create or help create content, making it the default approach rather than the exception. For buyers, this creates an exhausting experience where polished, professional content no longer signals quality or authenticity.

"This looks automated, so it's probably not worth my time."

The result is a baseline scepticism that affects all outreach, regardless of how it was actually created. Your carefully researched, personally written email gets lumped in with the flood of AI-generated spam because buyers can't easily distinguish between them. Generic value propositions, templated case studies, and professionally designed pitch decks all trigger the same response: "This looks automated, so it's probably not worth my time." The trust tax on legitimate, high-effort outreach is real and growing.

Doppelgängers and Deepfakes Are Making 'Seeing Is Believing' Obsolete

If content saturation has made buyers sceptical of written communication, deepfakes have eliminated their ability to trust what they see and hear. In January 2024, a finance employee transferred $25.6 million to fraudsters after participating in a video conference call. The employee initially suspected the email request was phishing, but those doubts evaporated when he joined a video call with what appeared to be the company's CFO and several colleagues. Every person on that call was a deepfake. The attackers used publicly available videos from company conferences and meetings to train AI models to convincingly impersonate multiple executives simultaneously.

This wasn't an isolated incident. WPP CEO Mark Read was targeted in a similar deepfake scam in which attackers created a fake WhatsApp account using his publicly available image, set up a Microsoft Teams meeting, and deployed voice-cloning technology alongside YouTube footage to impersonate him. The scam failed because a vigilant WPP employee noticed inconsistencies, but Read subsequently emailed leadership warning them to look out for similar attacks, concluding: "Just because the account has my photo doesn't mean it's me."

"Just because the account has my photo doesn't mean it's me."

The technology behind these attacks is accessible and improving rapidly. Voice cloning now requires as little as 3 seconds of audio from publicly available sources such as conference presentations, earnings calls, or podcast interviews. Video deepfakes can be created in under an hour using freely available software. What was once the domain of sophisticated criminal organisations is now available to anyone with basic technical skills and modest resources.

Implications for GTM Teams

For GTM teams, the implications go beyond fraud concerns. This trust crisis is changing how buyers engage with vendors and how your team must operate to be effective. The traditional playbook of scaling outreach through automation, leveraging polished marketing collateral, and building relationships through digital channels is running into new friction at every stage.

Your outbound engine is losing effectiveness not because your messaging is wrong, but because buyers assume most outreach is automated and low-effort. Your content marketing struggles to break through, not because the insights aren't valuable, but because buyers question whether they're reading genuine expertise or AI-generated filler. Your sales demos face initial scepticism, not because your product isn't compelling, but because prospects wonder whether they're truly engaging with someone who understands their specific challenges or whether they're following a script personalised for them by AI.

The operational challenges will compound these GTM obstacles sooner rather than later. Your team will need to verify identities for important communications, implement additional approval layers for material transactions, and maintain audit trails that can prove authenticity. These won't be just compliance exercises. They're necessary adaptations to an environment where trust can no longer be assumed based on familiar communication channels or recognised names.

The Need to Rebuild Trust Through Transparency and Proof

Rebuilding trust in this environment requires a fundamental shift from claims to evidence and from automation to demonstrable human involvement. The organisations that will succeed are those that embrace radical transparency about where and how they use AI, implement verified identity systems for critical communications, and keep humans visibly in the loop at crucial decision points.

Transparency about AI use isn't just good ethics. EU AI Act Article 50 transparency requirements take effect in August 2026, requiring organisations to inform people when they interact with AI systems and to clearly disclose AI‑generated or manipulated content in both human‑readable and machine‑detectable ways. Users must be informed before their first interaction when communicating with AI systems. In the United States, the FTC finalised a rule in October 2024 banning fake and AI-generated reviews. These regulatory frameworks are forcing what should be voluntary behaviour.

Beyond compliance, transparency builds trust because it signals respect for buyers. When you clearly indicate which parts of your process involve AI assistance, you acknowledge the trust deficit and show you're not trying to deceive anyone. This might mean labelling AI-generated sections in shared materials or explaining how you use AI to analyse customer data. The goal isn't to eliminate AI from the process. It's to ensure buyers understand where the machine ends, and the human begins.

It's to ensure buyers understand where the machine ends, and the human begins.

Identity verification and authentication provide another layer of trust that's moving from a nice-to-have to an essential. Cryptographic signing of important communications, protected and registered senderIDs for messaging, and authenticated channels like digital sales rooms reduce the attack surface for deepfake fraud and signal professionalism to buyers. When you use a secure portal for contract negotiations instead of an email thread, you're not just protecting against fraud. You're showing the buyer that you take security and authenticity seriously.

The human-in-the-loop principle matters most at material decision points. Keep real people directly involved in pricing exceptions, contract term negotiations, renewal discussions, and escalations. Make it genuinely easy for buyers to reach a real person, and ensure those people are empowered to add real value rather than just reading from a script. Every time a sales rep admits they don't know something and commits to finding out rather than generating an AI-powered answer, they're actually building trust by demonstrating authenticity.

Practical GTM Plays for a Low-Trust World

Translating the above principles into day-to-day operations requires specific plays that GTM teams can implement immediately. Start with trust-first positioning that makes security, governance, and ethical AI use part of your core value proposition rather than a compliance footnote. This means publishing your AI and data principles in clear language and making them available for all customer-facing teams, if not directly to customers. When prospects ask about your use of AI, treat it as an opportunity to differentiate rather than a concern to minimise, whether it is about product features or supporting the sales process.

When prospects ask about your use of AI, treat it as an opportunity to differentiate rather than a concern to minimise.

Implement proof-of-human GTM tactics that make real individuals visible and recognisable. Encourage named faces, voices, and ongoing content such as newsletters, podcasts, or office hours so that buyers can recognise consistent humans behind the brand. Video messages, live sessions, and strategic in-person moments become more valuable in this environment, particularly at late-stage deal milestones where trust is most critical. Make sure they feel human instead of AI-generated. When possible, meet in person to form a relationship. The goal is to create pattern recognition: buyers should be able to identify the actual people they'll work with and verify their authenticity through repeated exposure.

Bringing successful customers front and centre is one of the most powerful ways to cut through the trust deficit. Showcase them consistently in live and virtual events, in-depth interviews, and structured referral calls so buyers can hear real stories in real time from people who look like them and have solved similar problems with your product. Customer testimonials and success stories have always been important, but a fancy presentation alone won't be enough anymore. As with your team, your happy customers need to become visible and authentic.

Bringing successful customers front and centre is one of the most powerful ways to cut through the trust deficit.

Don't let AI run too freely. AI agents and content governance need formal processes and regular review. Maintain an inventory of all AI agents your organisation uses, document their permissions, and review them regularly with revenue and IT teams. Implement content standards that explicitly prohibit AI-generated testimonials, require human review of all AI-generated sales assets, and maintain audit trails of changes. These aren't extra work. They are a trust infrastructure that protects your organisation from operational and reputational risk.

Sales-Led GTM and Humans-in-the-Loop as Trust Advantages

The trust crisis actually strengthens the case for sales-led GTM motions that prioritise human involvement over complete self-service. While specific tactics like cold outreach and AI-generated content face increased scepticism, the human-centric foundation of sales-led growth becomes a competitive advantage precisely because it's harder to replicate at scale.

Live sales demos transition from product showcases to trust builders through real-time problem-solving. When a sales rep thinks on their feet during a sales demo and personalises a workflow based on questions, they're demonstrating human understanding that AI-generated content cannot replicate. Discovery work positions sales reps as trusted advisors. Direct, sustained human interaction creates the relationship foundation that resists commoditisation, particularly when those relationships are maintained through consistent, quality touchpoints over time.

Authenticity can become a competitive moat when buyers are drowning in AI-generated noise and desperately seeking genuine human expertise.

The winning formula for sales-led GTM in a low-trust environment is human expertise at critical moments combined with AI for efficiency and scale, with transparency on where each is used. The companies that succeed will be those who double down on humanity while using AI as an enabler rather than a replacement. Authenticity can become a competitive moat when buyers are drowning in AI-generated noise and desperately seeking genuine human expertise.