How to Become the Most Trusted Lens on the World You Serve
POSITIONING AND VALUE
Mia Mohamed
8/5/20267 min read
When I think about trust and value in B2B, my mind still goes back to the businesses that became essential before “content engines” and AI were ever part of the conversation.
Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters did not win because they shouted louder. They won because they became the most trusted lens on a very specific part of the world.
Bloomberg started with bond traders who were drowning in fragmented data and slow tools. The proposition was simple and practical: one place for real‑time market information, organised the way traders actually thought and worked. The value was obvious: faster, clearer decisions. The trust came from reliability. If you were on a desk, you knew the terminal would be there when you needed it.
Reuters built trust differently but with the same intent. In the middle of the twentieth century, they codified the Trust Principles: independence, integrity and freedom from bias in the way information was gathered and shared. For professionals making decisions on the back of news and data, that mattered. You were not just buying speed; you were buying confidence that someone was taking responsibility for keeping the lens clear.
The principle that sits underneath both stories is simple: value and trust were never separate. The product was the lens. The brand was the promise that the lens would remain sharp.
Today, the environment has changed. However, the principle has not.
Why brand matters more again
McKinsey recently surveyed 500 senior marketing leaders across Europe on what matters most for 2026. Branding came out on top, ahead of budget, data privacy, AI and everything else. For anyone who has spent the last decade defending brand budgets in ROI meetings, that feels like a long‑overdue rebalance.
At first glance of the survey, AI barely registers. GenAI was ranked 17th out of 20 priorities. Not because CMOs have missed the moment, but because most, like myself, still see AI as a tool, not a foundation. McKinsey’s own read is that many are underestimating both the urgency and the dependency, i.e. how much AI effectiveness relies on the basics already being in place (source: Mckinsey, State of Marketing Europe 2026).
One of those basics is visibility, where it is about being findable, understandable and present in the places where decisions get made. And those places are changing.
Early research into AI search behaviour is already pointing in a clear direction. Across thousands of commercial prompts, a majority of brands do not appear at all when AI assistants answer category‑level questions. That absence is not neutral. Brands cited in AI Overviews see trust scores rise, while uncited brands in the same query categories lose both traffic and trust. If your organisation does not show up when someone asks an AI about your market, most people will not dig deeper to find you. They will assume the shortlist the AI gave them is good enough, and move on.
In financial and professional services, that hits harder. When trust is the currency, invisibility is not neutral; it doesn’t just cost you a sale, it can cost you a mandate and, over time, your place on the shortlist.
Brand was always trust, made visible. AI is just the newest place it gets read.
From being known to being trusted
If you work in financial services, you know that trust is rarely earned in one moment. It accumulates slowly especially in the B2B space, shaped by:
whether you deliver when the stakes are high,
whether you are consistent when the market is unstable,
whether other people speak about you in the same terms you use for yourself.
In my 25+ years in financial services, I saw how trust was actually built: not through slogans, but through direct experience, reputation, trade press, analyst reports and, above all, relationships.
Today, the lens is wider and faster. Buyers and influencers are using:
search and answer engines,
private chats and communities,
AI tools that summarise what “the internet” seems to know about you.
They are not just asking “Who offers X?” They are asking “Who can I rely on?” and “Who feels credible in this space?”
If you do not show up clearly in those lenses, the practical effect is increasingly simple: you are not part of the default shortlist. Most buyers will not invest extra effort to find you; they will assume the options the AI presents are good enough and move on. In financial and professional services, where trust is the currency, that invisibility is not neutral and it doesn’t just cost you a click, but rather mandates as well and as we see with AI, a place on the shortlist.
That is why I think the real strategic question for B2B businesses now is this: How do we become the most trusted lens on the part of the world we claim to serve in this new era of search?
Brand, community and content as value engines to
building trust
If we strip away the noise around AI in markets today, three things still build trust and value in a way that travels across channels
and tools.
1. Brand: the visible layer of trust. Brand is not a logo or a strap line. It is the pattern people start to recognise when they see your work, and in an AI‑shaped market, brand does three jobs:
It makes you recognisable when people scan a crowded landscape.
It makes you legible when AI systems and humans try to summarise what you do.
It makes you predictable when the market is looking for stability.
A strong brand in financial services is not just distinct but also dependable. It tells buyers, “We know this world, and we will still be here when it gets complicated.”
2. Community: trust, shared and reinforced. Communities have become one of the most important mirrors for trust. In 2025, the share of community leaders who say their function is “integral to the organisation” rose to 67%, up from 54% a year earlier according to a report by the community roundtable , a clear signal that community is moving from a support role to a core growth lever. In the financial services sector, that might mean:
treasurers sharing notes in closed groups,
payment leaders comparing experiences at events,
founders and CFOs swapping views on which partners actually show up when things go wrong.
If your value is only visible in your own content, it will struggle to hold. When your customers, partners and peers start to repeat your story in their own words, trust moves from claim to consensus.
Community does not have to be large, but it does have to be real. A small group of the right people saying, “These are the people I trust for this kind of problem,” is more powerful than a broad audience that is only mildly aware you exist. I saw that first hand in the crypto markets in 2019, while heading up marketing for a crypto wallet startup in the B2B DeFi space. The advent of the Crypto Curry Club, brought together key voices and decision‑makers to discuss the state and future of the market on a monthly basis over a curry dinner. It grew by word of mouth from around 12 participants to 30, and the community is still active today as CCC Events, running regular blockchain and crypto gatherings across the UK.
3. Content: the lens people use to think. Content is where much of today’s investment is flowing and not just in tools, but in the assets that control how markets are seen. The creator economy just recorded its busiest half‑year on record: 70 M&A deals in six months, up 23% year on year. For the first time, the most acquired asset class in this market was not software, but media IP and audience‑owning businesses, e.g. media brands, newsletters, creator networks and similar properties. Headline deals such as Accenture’s estimated $500M+ acquisition of Whalar, OpenAI’s reported $100M purchase of a small media company, and Publicis’s $500M buy of Influential all point in the same direction: when AI can rebuild any tool quickly, capital chases what it cannot generate overnight: audiences, trust, relationships and judgment.
There is a reason for that. Content is how businesses now:
explain the world as they see it,
frame problems in ways that make sense to their buyers,
and demonstrate the depth of their understanding.
The risk is that content becomes quantity, not clarity, i.e. infinite output with very little signal.
If you want your content to build trust rather than noise, the test is simple and measurable: does it help the audience see their world more clearly and make better decisions, and does that show up in the places they now use to decide? In practice, that means asking two questions. First, when someone asks an AI about your market, does your content get cited as a source? Brands cited in AI Overviews see trust scores rise by up to 3.7 points, while uncited peers lose both traffic and trust according to recent research by visionary marketing UK. Second, does that visibility translate into action? Cited brands see a 23% lift in branded search within 30 days, a sign that AI exposure is turning into real interest. If the answer to both is yes, content becomes a value engine. It turns your expertise into something usable and teaches both humans and AI systems how to think about your part of the market. If the answer is no, content is just another way to look busy.
The leadership question
All of this leads me to one leadership question I think is worth asking now, open and honestly. If someone asked AI about your company tomorrow, what would it say and would you recognise yourself in that answer?
If the response is thin, generic or absent, it is a signal that the basics of brand, community and content are not yet doing their job. The problem is not that AI “does not know you”. The problem is that the market does not yet have a clear, consistent story to feed it.
Bloomberg and Reuters did not wait for others to define their lens. They decided, day-by-day, to be useful, reliable and principled in the way they showed up. Thirty plus years on, the market learned to trust that lens.
In today’s environment, you do not need to be Bloomberg or Reuters to apply the same principle. You need to be willing to answer three simple questions:
Which part of the world do you claim to serve?
How do you help people see it more clearly and act more confidently?
What are you doing, every day, to make that lens the one they trust most?
Brand was always trust, made visible. AI is just the newest place it gets read.
The opportunity now is to decide what you want it to read.
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