A blog on the trust deficit, the age of sameness, and why relationships are the only antidote.
We’re now halfway through the year, and I can finally bring myself to write about it. 2026 started unusually and painfully for RCG. On our second day back to the office after a week-long holiday closure, we received a verification call from our check company (not our bank) to confirm we had changed our address and wanted checks sent to New Mexico! Long story short, we immediately froze our accounts and worked with our bank of 18 years to determine status. We were told everything seemed to be in order. Two weeks later, we learned we were out of $25,000 and after filing a police report, notifications to the state and federal agencies with acronyms I never cared to know, and letters to our legislative representatives, we are being told we are flat out of luck. Worse than that, somehow, it was our fault that:
- a company email address was hacked,
- that the bank allowed our verification phone number to be changed (what’s the purpose of multi-factor verification and fraud departments again if you don’t receive a call that your verification phone number is being changed?), and
- that hackers attempted to log into our bank account 258 times between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, before successfully breaching our account.
What frustrates me the most is not the loss we have to carry on our books in 2026, but the blow to the trust we thought we had with our bank. On average, we signed in a half dozen times a month, and we never moved money from one account to another without first making a phone call. So when we started hearing, “this happens more than you know” from other banking associates, I wondered… if this happened to us, who can small business owners really trust?
Before you send me leads to new banks, we’ve already moved some personal funds to a credit union where we are truly “known” and our business funds to a national bank with the highest security and verification processes. This whole experience, though, got me thinking about the trust gap that’s widening; not a gap in technology, but a gap in intention — one that’s costing businesses and society more than most people realize.
Trust is eroding systemically.
Across banking, services, and marketing, consumers are losing confidence — driven by unexpected fees, poor service, and being treated as transactions rather than people. Trust erosion has been happening for years and recently declined more significantly. The result? Tired of being treated like numbers, customers are switching institutions in the same frequency as they update their wardrobe (13% of bank customers said they were likely to switch institutions within 12 months).
Though shaken in our faith, we seasoned citizens still hold out hope in our institutions, but that’s not the case for our children and grandchildren. Sadly, distrust grows across generational lines. While 44% of consumers globally trusted banks with their personal data in 2024, among those aged 16-25, that figure dropped to just 32% by 2025. We’re losing the next generation’s trust not only due to bad service or high fees, but because we’re building systems that are efficient, yet alienating, as we can’t tell whether the entity reaching out to us is a person, a program, or a predator.
In our case, the predators broke through what we thought were secure banking systems. While our bank didn’t flag this unusual account activity or take other protective measures, it’s worth noting that it was a human in a print company’s fraud department that questioned the validity of a requested transaction and notified us of the problem.
Bots have made communication itself suspect.
Fraud is so pervasive that people now ignore legitimate outreach! According to Javelin Strategy & Research’s 2026 Identity Fraud Study, identity fraud and scams combined cost consumers $38 billion in 2025, affecting 36 million victims. Our experience piqued my interest and caused me to dig deeper. Did you know that new account fraud surged 31% in victim count from the prior year, driven in large part by automated bot attacks? As bank imposter scams rise, the consequences go far beyond financial loss. They reshape how consumers interpret communication from their own financial institutions.
The study also found that when consumers received a fraud alert, 55% of those who didn’t respond were unresponsive because they believed the alert itself was a scam. Read that again! Over half of consumers who received a real fraud alert didn’t respond because they assumed it was a scam. The rise of automated fraud didn’t just steal money. It stole something harder to restore: the baseline assumption of good faith.
Because the fraud environment has made every communication suspect, people are ignoring legitimate warnings.
Sift’s Q2 2025 Digital Trust Index reported that 70% of consumers say it’s become more difficult to identify scams than it was 12 months ago. One in three consumers now believes someone has already attempted to scam them using AI.
And, Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report, shared malicious bots now account for 37% of all internet traffic — up from 32% the year prior. It also notes that four in 10 website visits come not from a human being but from automated software, and most of those are designed to exploit, deceive, or defraud. In this fraud environment, where we’re taught to be suspicious of every outreach, even genuine, human connection ends up getting filtered out as noise. Trust has a cost basis, and bots have driven it through the roof.
AI is creating a sameness crisis.
If bot-driven fraud eroded trust by making communication dangerous, AI-driven content is eroding it through a subtler but equally corrosive force: making everything feel the same.
Researchers at Columbia Business School and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business studied content homogenization in the restaurant industry, a highly fragmented sector where 70% of establishments are independently owned. Their 2025 paper found that restaurants using generative AI for marketing content saw measurable decreases in lexical, syntactic, and semantic diversity compared to human-created content. The authors note that content produced by popular large language models appears more similar to each other than human-created work, and that this homogenization “may dampen consumer engagement and dilute brand uniqueness over time.”
As you scroll through your social media feed, you can feel this without being able to name it. A financial advisor and a roofing company’s content looks remarkably similar. A wellness coach and a law firm share the same carousel format, the same hook structure, and the same deliberately-casual voice. Different businesses, different expertise, different customers… applying the same marketing.
With practically all marketing professionals using AI in their daily activities, the tool loses its competitive advantage. When everyone uses the same tools trained on the same data, optimized for the same engagement metrics, the output converges. The once hard-won strategic asset of “brand differentiation” dissolves.
And consumers are noticing.
With nearly 70% of respondents concerned AI-generated content will be used to deceive them and 85% of consumers preferring interacting with a real person over AI in service contexts, the preference for human connection continues to grow as AI deployment increases.
According to influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy, consumer preference for AI-generated creator content dropped from 60% in 2023 to just 26% by early 2026. What audiences once found novel, they now find suspect. And, what they find suspect, they’re learning to tune out.
The intangible but very real value of content that feels human, specific, and earned, what we’ll call the authenticity premium, is growing precisely because it has become scarce.
Being known drives measurable loyalty.
I’m going to show my age again and ask you to recall the Cheers intro song chorus. “Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came.” There is a psychological phenomenon that anyone who has had a long-term relationship with a doctor, financial advisor, or bartender understands: when someone knows your history, you relax. You don’t need to spend time re-establishing context, and you don’t hedge or over explain your situation in order to ensure you are believed. You share in confidence because you are already known. This isn’t just a feeling. It carries over directly to measurable business outcomes. Consider these findings:
- Trust outperforms price. XM Institute’s 2025 Trust Index found consumer trust is a stronger predictor of repurchase, forgiveness, and referral than perceived value or cost. Trust isn’t a feature, it’s the product.
- Personalization at the individual level matters. 75% of American consumers are more loyal to brands that understand them personally — not just as a demographic segment.
- Loyalty, once earned, tends to last. 59% of consumers say that once they’re loyal to a brand, they’re loyal for life.
The winning differentiator isn’t automation speed, it’s RECOGNITION. The brands that retain loyalty will be those that invest in making customers feel known, not just served.
Use AI in service of the relationship, not in place of it.
Technology should arm humans to be more present, not replace the human altogether. The relationship is the point and the tool we use should serve it. Consider these supporting stats:
- Personalization, but not at any cost. 64% of bank customers want personalized experiences, yet 53% have serious privacy concerns about how their data is used. This study also shows consumer comfort with AI dropped 11 points in a single year.
- The more AI is deployed, the more people want humans. As AI rollout accelerated, preference for human service grew, from 83% to 85%, and frustration with AI agents rose from 54% to 59%,
- Loyalty follows the human touch. 73% of consumers say they’d be more loyal to companies that use real people for service interactions — up from 69% in the same period.
Did you catch the contradiction? Businesses are scaling automation to get closer to customers. Customers are responding by wanting humans more. The gap between what companies are building and what people actually want continues to widen. It’s not about doing things quicker and cheaper, it’s about earning your customers’ trust. In essence, trust isn’t a feature you layer on top of the product. It is the product.
According to customer loyalty research, customers with an emotional relationship with a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value than those without one. The brands that will hold onto it are not the ones that automate fastest. They’re the ones that invest in recognition.
There is a cruel irony at the center of modern customer experience strategy. Businesses have invested billions in “personalization” technology — recommendation engines, behavioral targeting, preference modeling — and the result has been that more people feel less seen than ever.
Why? Because there’s a fundamental difference between being targeted and being known.
Being targeted means an algorithm has inferred you’re probably in the market for a product based on your browsing patterns. Being known means someone understands your situation, your history, your constraints, and your goals — and uses that understanding to serve you better.
Targeted personalization is surveillance wearing a smile. It often feels invasive rather than attentive. Known personalization is built through time, trust, and genuine attention. The first can be automated. The second cannot. Interestingly, the more aggressively companies have pursued algorithmic personalization, the more suspicious consumers have become of the results.
Meanwhile, the data on what customers actually want from service interactions is unambiguous. As noted earlier, an AI in customer service showed that 79% of Americans strongly prefer interacting with a human over an AI agent. They feel human agents better understand their needs (61%), provide more thorough explanations (53%), and are less likely to frustrate them (52%). Just 8% prefer AI.
As technology scales, the human desire for genuine connection is not going away. This isn’t an argument against technology. It is an argument about where technology belongs in the hierarchy of your customer experience.
The mistake most businesses are making is not adopting AI, but positioning AI as the primary relationship. Then they wondered why customer relationships feel hollow after deploying a tool in place of human judgment, empathy, and accountability. That’s not a product upgrade, it’s a downgrade boasting an efficiency label.
The most compelling use of AI in service contexts is not replacing the human, it’s arming the human to be more fully present. For example, using AI for meeting preparation, administration, or coordination, frees the human to focus on the relationship, deliver the care, and/or collaborate on the plan. Building the relationship is the point.
When a staggering 88% of brand messaging fails to connect with consumers’ real needs and values, almost nine in ten marketing messages miss the person they’re aimed at. No algorithm can solve this because the problem isn’t informational, it’s relational.
Be intentional about knowing your customers.
The businesses that will build durable customer relationships in the coming decade will not necessarily be the ones that deploy the most AI. They will be the ones that ask a harder question first: Does this technology make my customer feel more known, or less?
If the answer is less, no amount of cost savings justifies it because you’re trading the one thing that actually compounds over time: trust.
Yes, bots have made communication suspect and AI has made content indistinguishable. In this environment, the genuine article — a real person who knows your name, remembers your situation, and cares about the outcome — holds a competitive advantage.
Cheers to a better start of the second half of 2026. Need help building intentional relationships that sustain trust and solidly earn customer loyalty? Reach out to us!
Author: Claire Riggs
Date: June 29, 2026
