How do chief trust officers measure and own trust?

What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is yours. That’s seemingly the motto of chief trust officers (CTrOs), whose role is heavily focused on a virtue that requires a village to create and maintain.

CTrOs are the newest trending role among SaaS vendors and other tech companies. Matt Aiello, partner at executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, told IT Brew these professionals are specifically tasked with ensuring their company’s products are architected and deployed securely, as well as with interacting with customers.

“They’re pretty special. They’re uniquely technical…[and] they’re also very deep with customers,” Aiello said, adding CTrOs are like CTOs with deep security chops and an eye for product and security risks.

But what does trust look like from a business perspective, and how do CTrOs know when they’re moving the proverbial needle?

What even is trust? IT Brew caught up with a couple of CTrOs to understand how they are measuring impact in their roles. Sebastian Goodwin, Autodesk SVP and CTrO, told IT Brew in an interview at RSAC that clarity on the meaning of “trust” was critical when signing onto his role because “it’s not fun to be in a position that you can’t define and can’t measure.” His definition of trust is inspired by Ashley Reichheld and Amelia Dunlop’s book, The Four Factors of Trust: How Organizations Can Earn Lifelong Loyalty; to Goodwin, trust comprises humanity, capability, reliability, and transparency.

“There’s also a scoring methodology that goes with that, and it’s called the TrustID score,” Goodwin said. “You can imagine an NPS score, but for trust.”

Jim Routh, Saviynt CTrO, told IT Brew he relies heavily on feedback from current and prospective customers to measure trust at his company: “What I want to do is make sure that the expectations that we’re managing with our customers and prospective customers is aligned with what our actual capabilities are.”

“I probably learn more about things I’ve done incorrectly from feedback from customers, versus what things I’ve done correctly,” Routh said. “And, frankly, that’s helpful, because that gives us kind of a focus for what to adjust.”

But customers aren’t the only source of knowledge when it comes to trust, according to Goodwin, who added he also relies on employees.

“It turns out it’s very hard to build trust with customers if people don’t trust each other inside the company,” Goodwin said.

Making their mark. Because trust often depends on effective work between departments, Goodwin said he carves his own lane within his organization by making sure Autodesk employees understand their own role in building trust—something he said starts at the leadership level.

“If you have that from the top down, it really makes a difference in how people feel working together in the company and trust each other,” Goodwin said. On the consumer side, Goodwin focuses heavily on transparency. Last year, for example, he helped roll out Autodesk’s “AI Transparency Cards.” The graphics, inspired by nutritional labels, serve as a tool customers can use to understand information like what a specific Autodesk AI feature does and the types of LLM models supporting it.

“What I found is a lot of tech companies are just like, ‘Read the fine print. It’s all in there,’...and so, we decided to take the extremely opposite approach and make this very simple format,” Goodwin said. An Autodesk research study found customers were more than 3-times more likely to try its AI capabilities after viewing the transparency card.

Limitations? For Routh, who has experience as a CSO, the challenge is less on making his mark as a CTrO and more on resisting the urge to “drive changes in operations” in his role.

“I have to suppress that urge because I’m not in an operational role,” Routh said. “My job is to, over time, change both the behavior aligned with cyber resilience for the enterprise, and then to communicate that, ultimately, to our stakeholders, which are customers.”