Why credibility, validation and accreditation now define disruptive tech growth.
Across 2024–2025, enterprise AI moved from experiment to everyday tool. Yet as adoption accelerates, confidence in the systems behind it hasn’t quite kept pace. The question is no longer what can technology do, but who can be trusted to deploy it well.
Trust in technology can no longer be assumed. Even beyond AI, confidence in digital systems has plateaued. The Thales 2025 Digital Trust Index confirms a global decline in consumer trust for digital services, with no sector exceeding a 50% "high trust" rating. Consumers are wary. Enterprises are cautious. And in that gap between innovation and assurance, credibility has quietly become the new currency of growth.
The Trust Imperative
In enterprise technology, trust behaves like gravity: invisible, often undervalued, but impossible to escape. Buying software is not a transaction; it’s a long-term commitment to a vendor’s reliability, governance, and staying power.
Kevin Chung, Chief Strategy Officer at enterprise AI platform WRITER, notes that enterprise adoption depends as much on credibility as capability.
April Chin, Co-CEO of Resaro, adds that trust is often defined by how vendors manage risk transparency: “There isn’t any AI system that will give you 100 per cent accuracy. Enterprises will always ask: if I buy your product, what residual risks remain? How much have you, the vendor, already addressed, and how much do I, the buyer, still need to manage?”
Without credible assurances, even the most sophisticated products stall at the first hurdle. Enterprises default to incumbents not because they are faster, but because they have already earned the luxury of trust. For new entrants, success now depends on proving reliability before promising results. Start-ups that treat trust as a feature rather than a foundation will find themselves left behind. The strongest ones design it in from day one: transparent delivery, clear accountability, and a robust governance framework that holds up to scrutiny.
When Trust Breaks: How Mis-verification Sinks Adoption
Across industries, the gulf between pilot and production remains one of enterprise AI’s hardest lessons. Adoption is climbing, but confidence in results still lags behind. Gartner projects that by the end of 2025, almost one-third of generative AI projects will be abandoned before deployment, undone by weak data governance, unclear ROI, or risk gaps.
Kevin observes that many organisations over-invest in ambitious pilots that never quite translate into usable solutions. The fallout isn’t just financial; each failed experiment erodes collective trust, making the next innovator’s path even steeper.
April adds a warning from experience: “A computer vision model might claim 99 per cent accuracy, but if it was trained on US or UK data, it will not generalise well in Singapore’s multi-racial context. By the time enterprises discover this, contracts are already signed. It’s too late.”
Each failed pilot leaves behind more than sunk cost. It leaves a residue of doubt that slows entire markets. Independent AI assurance frameworks can help break that cycle. By validating claims early and testing systems in context, they help enterprises scale responsibly – and startups build digital trust that lasts beyond the first contact.
Accreditation and Assurance as Catalysts, Not Substitutes
For emerging companies, credibility – or digital trust – is often the hardest thing to scale. Even when products perform well, buyers still ask: can this team sustain it, and for how long? That’s where IMDA Accreditation and the IMDA Spark programme play an outsized role.
Kevin notes that accreditation functions as a visible signal of reliability, especially across APAC, where IMDA-accredited firms are immediately seen as enterprise-ready. Accreditation doesn’t just open doors; it shortens the distance to trust.
April adds that the IMDA Spark process directly addresses one of the most common enterprise concerns: vendor continuity. Enterprises need to know that their partners will still be around when the next phase begins. IMDA’s due diligence answers that question upfront.
External assurance does more than de-risk contracts. It accelerates opportunity. By acting as pre-vetting for procurement teams, it allows startups to focus on delivery while procurement teams move faster. Frameworks like IMDA Accreditation and the IMDA Spark programme don’t replace digital trust – they multiply it.
From Hype to Use: Education, Right-sized Assurance, Delivery
Despite the rapid rise of AI and automation, many enterprises still struggle to convert ambition into results. PwC’s 2025 Global Digital Trust Insights survey found that only two per cent of organisations have fully implemented cyber resilience, even as boards rank cyber risk among their top concerns. Ambition races ahead, but assurance often lags.
Deloitte points out that scaling GenAI solutions is less a technical issue than a governance one. It’s not about computing power; it’s about organisational digital maturity. Enterprises now look for partners who can build trust into every phase of delivery – not just the end product.
Kevin recalls how many early adopters defaulted to big vendors, only to find their “one size fits all” approach falls short in high-stakes enterprise environments. The AI companies that thrived weren’t the largest, but the ones who delivered a “perfect fit” tailored to each individual customer.
“If assurance is thought about early, it saves months later,” says April. “We’ve had clients who only realised at the production stage that they weren’t ready to accept the risks. By right-sizing testing at each stage, you unblock procurement and prevent costly rewinds.”
In a market burned by overpromising, reliability has become the new disruption.
Scaling Trust Beyond Singapore
Global trust in technology is faltering. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer: Tech Sector reports a steady decline in confidence toward tech enterprises worldwide, with privacy, safety, and governance concerns shaping public sentiment. For Singapore, this global dip is both a warning and a chance to demonstrate that digital trust can be designed, not assumed.
Singapore’s digital trust frameworks have become regional anchors, setting benchmarks for accreditation and assurance. But as digital ecosystems globalise, Singapore’s credibility frameworks must learn to travel.
Kevin notes that IMDA Accreditation gives companies a strong foundation to stand on. It signals rigour, governance and quality — attributes that buyers everywhere recognise. In some markets, buyers may still seek additional validation aligned to their own frameworks, but Accreditation provides that common starting point for trust.
“Vendors love getting their first Singapore client because it’s like an indirect trust mark. But if we want digital trust to become an exportable value proposition, Singapore has to be clearer about what makes its frameworks globally distinctive,” adds April.
Singapore’s frameworks send a strong home signal, but their influence depends on how well they align internationally. Mapping IMDA Accreditation to international frameworks such as ISO, or regional AI Acts – and adapting validation to local buyer expectations – will ensure that startups are able to scale trust beyond the borders.
Founder Playbook: Make Trust Hygiene, Then Differentiate on Pace
The relationship between adoption and trust has become a litmus test for competitiveness. KPMG’s 2025 Global Study on Trust and AI found that while 66% of people use AI regularly, fewer than half trust it. Trust, in other words, is scaling slower than technology.
For founders, governance is no longer overhead. It is infrastructure. The discipline of trust begins with three fundamentals:
- Transparent, reliable, and secure technology foundations.
- Partnerships built on accountability and ethical conduct.
- A connected ecosystem where industry, regulators, and users share knowledge openly.
“Trust won’t be a differentiator in ten years. It’s already table stakes. The real question is: once you’ve cleared that bar, how fast can you innovate, and how much value can you create?” says Kevin.
“If you’re under pressure to scale before your foundations are ready, don’t take the short-term gain at the expense of long-term trust. Once lost, trust is very, very hard to earn back. Find an assurance partner who can complement you from the beginning and grow alongside your innovation journey,” adds April.
The best founders don’t treat trust as a PR line. They operationalise it. Measure it. Defend it. Those who embed it early move faster later, because trust compounds like interest.
This ecosystem approach is already taking shape. Singapore continues to invest in the next generation of AI talent development through initiatives that emphasise ethical innovation, skills development, and public-private partnerships — preparing a workforce that treats trust as a technical and cultural skill.
From Fragile to Enduring Trust
The conversation on trust has shifted from if it matters to how it endures. As frameworks tighten and expectations rise, trust has evolved from differentiator to prerequisite.
For Singapore’s disruptive tech founders, that shift is not a constraint but a head start. Frameworks such as IMDA Accreditation and IMDA Spark programmes already set the standard. What comes next is making credibility visible – through consistency, performance, and delivery that holds up under scrutiny.
Start-ups that neglect trust may win headlines, but they rarely win time. Those that build it early grow faster, scale further, and last longer.
Because trust doesn’t slow innovation. It makes innovation possible.
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