The brands that will thrive in the next era of generative AI, and inevitable misinformation, won’t necessarily be the best storytellers.

It won't be those who are the loudest, smoothest or even most visible, it'll be those that are most trusted. It will be the ones with real, pre-existing trust built into their ecosystems long before they need to call on it. Because in the environment we’re now operating in, when narratives destabilise, it’s not facts that restabilise them. It’s trusted interpreters.

Trust beats noise

The King's Fund recently highlighted how one English county dramatically improved vaccine uptake not through national messaging or clever campaigns, but through years of unglamorous local groundwork.

Before the pandemic, uptake in vaccinations in Gloucestershire lagged behind the national picture. During it, the county surged ahead. Not because it delivered a more powerful campaign, but because it had already done the relational work.

Vaccinations happened in the clinics people already used and trusted. Invitations came from their own GP, not an anonymous booking system. The faces at the door were known to them. That quiet familiarity meant trust didn’t have to be built in the moment. It was already there.

Such an example matters for brands because we’re now operating inside the same structural conditions: high emotion, collapsing attention, accelerating misinformation and machine-generated certainty flooding channels. In that environment, authenticity stops being a soft brand value and becomes a form of resilience.

Misinformation, disinformation and trusted interpretation

I recently spent a day with the Chartered Institute of Public Relations digging into misinformation and disinformation. One point landed hard: this is no longer just a comms problem. It’s a systemic risk. When erosion of trust reaches a certain speed, organisations don’t just lose reputation. They lose function.

You can see it happening in the news cycle every week. A recent example being the brief online hype around Comet 3I/ATLAS. An interesting but completely ordinary astronomical object turned into speculation about alien craft within hours. Not because the science was unclear, but because the feeds were. Emotion moved faster than explanation.

Then the steadying voices arrived. Professor Brian Cox cut through the noise by pointing out that there was “nothing remotely artificial” about the object and that its behaviour was consistent with a natural interstellar visitor. No drama. No theatre. Just trusted interpretation doing its job.

That moment passed quickly. But the pattern is now familiar. Narrative leaps first. Truth jogs behind it. Trust decides which one people wait for.

Authority travels further than facts

At the same time, we’re pouring generative AI into the middle of this system: confident outputs by design and polished grammar by default. Probabilistic inference increasingly delivered as declarative fact. This quiet kind of misinformation, while not malicious, is just confident enough to be believed.

As generative AI becomes normalised, the advantage won’t sit with whoever produces the most content. It will sit with whoever is believed. In a low-trust environment, the brands that win will be the ones that make their judgements clear, their decision-making explainable and their uncertainty visible rather than concealed.

This is why authenticity for brands now has far less to do with sounding human on social media and far more to do with whether they are structurally trusted when things go wrong. Whether people already believe them before reassurance is needed. Whether they have laid foundations with the voices in their sector who steady debate rather than inflame it.

Every industry has its equivalents of Brian Cox. Sometimes they’re journalists, analysts or founders. Sometimes they’re community figures whose authority comes from consistency rather than reach. The resilient brands will be the ones who know who those people are and have built relationships with them long before a narrative breaks.

The mistake many brands still make is assuming they can step into that role themselves at the moment of need. They can’t. Trust doesn’t work on demand. It compounds slowly or it doesn’t exist at all.

Which brings us back to that hyper-local healthcare example. Gloucestershire didn’t outperform by crafting better messages. It outperformed because it already had the social infrastructure in place. The campaign didn’t create trust. It revealed it.

That’s the lesson for brands now. You can only activate what already exists.

Trust is the real infrastructure

For comms leaders and CMOs, this reframes authenticity as a commercial risk issue, not a brand preference. In a low-trust environment, acquisition costs rise, conversion slows, crisis impact deepens and recovery takes longer. Trust shortens every one of those curves. It’s both a reputation metric and a performance multiplier.

We are in uncertain times where narratives move fast, trust is thin, emotional velocity is high, and where machines – that sound more confident than they have any right to be – act as accelerants.

In that world, authenticity is no longer just about rough edges versus polished. It’s about whether you’ve built a system that can hold under pressure. The brands that understand that will be listened to when belief becomes scarce.

If this piece has prompted a few uncomfortable questions about where your brand actually sits in your sector’s trust network, that’s no bad thing. Those are the questions we spend our time with at Tank. And they tend to be the ones that matter most in the long run.