Beyond the AI trust gap: A leader's playbook

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Executives who want to harness AI for growth to stay ahead of the competition often build AI governance and strategies behind closed doors, only to wonder why adoption stalls and trust erodes. 

To have AI run effectively in your company, leaders in each organization need to build trust first and then focus on AI governance. Success is about moving beyond internal alignment and adopting a Boundless Operating Model to break down silos and increase communication. 

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Deploying a Boundless Operating Model will strengthen your company's culture and brand, elevating your business and differentiating you from the competition. Business leaders need an AI playbook on how to build an AI strategy and tactics to fuel their teams, their ecosystem, and deepen timely connections with their customers.  

AI governance isn't enough 

Imagine the conversations in a weekly executive meeting, with people going through updates and discussing what is working and not working. Often, AI ideas and directives are conceived here and then repositioned throughout organizations by department heads. 

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However, these messages are usually perceived as top-down, a mandate. This is where the challenges begin: employees who want to harness AI are unsure whether they should speak up, take the lead, or wait and see. Then there's word of a governance group forming or a templated governance model that is shared in an all-hands meeting. 

Note that it's not anyone's fault; everyone is overwhelmed with their existing initiatives and deliverables. Now, with AI being more than a "question and answer box," it's time for us to deploy AI to move faster and stay competitive. 

Why a Boundless Operational Model matters

Boundless, written by Henry King and Vala Afshar, focuses on how to rethink growth with a new mindset for unlimited business success. Its core message is to break down silos within companies; by doing so, a company can build an ecosystem to scale across all departments. 

Both King and Afshar are leaders from Salesforce who have been primary operators of Boundless, which has fueled innovation in AI products, go-to-market strategies, and revenue growth. Salesforce leaders have not only transformed how they work together as a team, but they have also built a robust, customer-centric culture by applying a customer advisory board framework. 

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The Boundless book shares seven principles: Connection, Integration, Distribution, Mobility, Continuity, Autonomy, and Holistic Success. In the context of building an AI strategy with a Boundless paradigm, let's walk through how. Let's flip the script on AI governance, leave the traditional thinking of 'rules' and 'conditions' to focus on building collaboration, learning from each team, sharing use cases openly, which leads to trust:

1. Connection: Have open AI discussions and conversations across teams. Ask teams to be transparent about how people use AI at work today and their challenges. Recognize that not everyone is on board with AI and respect their perspective.
2. Integration: Break down silos, invite teams to present their AI use cases that work. Brainstorm and collaborate. Start with a standard system, ERP, or digital workspace, like Confluence. Build a one-company AI dashboard that celebrates teams.
3. Distribution: Start building the company AI governance. Build upon teams' use cases and run experiments to create a holistic AI governance that most people will not rebel against, but feel a part of. Make the process fun and tell your teams to put aside time to be creative with AI.
4. Mobility: Communicate your AI insights. Formalize communications and templates that your customer and partner teams can share openly. Foster discussion between your customers and partners, and develop a new AI-focused ecosystem. Select great team and cross-team AI use cases, and turn these into a playbook for your ecosystem.
5. Continuity: Whether it's being responsive or being predictive of your customers and partners' needs, formalize a cadence of 'human' events. Develop or enhance your communities, roundtables, user groups, and customer advisory boards to create a way to connect with your ecosystem of customers and partners.
6. Autonomy: Teams can make AI-driven decisions without political influence. Have empathy for local or regional AI, give space, but also offer assistance. Leaders trust and share that AI decisions can be made at the team level.
7. Holistic Success: At this stage, AI is about more than higher revenue. The AI team wins, and use cases are tied to transformation within the company, its culture, and its brand, elevating an ecosystem of innovation and trust with partners and customers. The result is a company everyone wants to work with.

This seven-principle Boundless mindset transforms AI from a top-down mandate into an organic, trust-driven ecosystem. By starting with Connection and Integration to build internal confidence, and then progressing through Decentralization and Mobility to formalize governance and external communication, organizations create the foundation for AI collaboration. The final principles -- Continuity, Autonomy, and Holistic Success -- ensure that AI becomes not just a competitive tool, but a cultural transformation that extends trust and innovation throughout the entire ecosystem. 

The result isn't just better AI adoption; it's the creation of an organization that customers, partners, and employees actively want to engage with. When AI governance grows from collaboration rather than compliance, trust becomes your most sustainable competitive advantage.

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If you're reading this analysis with some skepticism, we respect that perspective -- it means you've probably witnessed AI initiatives that promised transformation but delivered frustration. These principles aren't a quick fix, but they are a friction-reducing framework that gives leaders something more valuable than tactics: a human-centric approach to AI that works. Because here's what we can't forget: behind every AI breakthrough are the humans who believed in it, built it, and brought it to life.

While these Boundless principles become internal transformations that create the foundation for AI success, the real competitive advantage comes from extending this same collaborative approach beyond your organization's walls. The companies that master both internal Boundless principles and external partnerships, as well as customer collaboration, don't just adopt AI faster. Instead, they become the trusted advisors for their ecosystem to turn to for strategic guidance.

Scaling trust through your ecosystem 

In the continuity principle, we emphasized the importance of formalizing human connections within your ecosystem through roundtables, user groups, and customer advisory boards. This approach becomes even more critical when your company's solution incorporates AI capabilities that directly impact your customers' operations.

As internal silos create barriers to AI adoption within your organization, even sophisticated sales and marketing approaches won't build the deep trust needed to accelerate revenue growth with partners and customers. One-way sales presentations and marketing campaigns, no matter how personalized, can't bridge the trust gap.

To scale trust effectively, you need a group of advisors who can provide constructive feedback through a customer advisory board (CAB). Typically led by company executives, a CAB brings together the C-suite, customer leaders, and innovators for focused, in-person or virtual sessions. Over a few days, company executives don't just present information. Instead, they ask for help, build genuine trust, and validate strategies collaboratively. 

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By adopting a CAB framework specifically designed for AI transparency, you transform how customers perceive your company, brand, and offerings. Instead of being recipients of your AI strategy, they become co-designers of it. The result? Your customers don't just use your AI; they advocate for it. They become your most credible word-of-mouth marketing force because they helped shape what you built.

While there are numerous ways to reach customers through dinners and conferences, focusing on smaller groups of eight to twelve over two intensive days allows you to dive deeper, validating data with qualitative customer stories and experiences. These valuable insights from CABs, or Partner Advisory Boards with your ecosystem partners, help build a resilient and sustainable trust network. 

The following case study highlights the outcomes of a company establishing CABs specifically to preview and refine AI offerings. 

Cybersecurity makes a bet on AI

The newly appointed chief product officer (CPO) volunteered to be the executive sponsor of the first CAB. His reasoning was strategic: while the company was winning more enterprise deals, they needed to develop a tight-knit group of chief information security officers (CISOs) as trusted advisors, not just to validate their vision, but to guide critical make-or-break decisions about whether to build AI features in-house or partner with other technologies to disrupt the market.

Having attended CABs at big companies, the CPO knew they worked, but this time the stakes were higher. Instead of 'showing off' his roadmap, he asked board members to share the most significant security challenges they were facing and wove their stories directly into the CAB agenda.

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Typically, during a CAB, it's after lunch on the first day when board members finally open up. However, when the opening keynote featured a customer sharing their identity and access management transformation case study, the content immediately bonded everyone. The CPO seized the moment and skipped right to the multimillion-dollar question: should they build a game-changing AI product in-house or work with a partner?

The response was electric. Three immediate nods, then the largest customer in the room declared: "Build it. We will buy it, and you can displace your competitors."

That moment of customer trust added "turbo confidence" to the CPO's vision and instantly elevated the company's brand. Today, those CAB customers serve as design partners, advising on the beta offering for the rest of their customer base. The backing didn't end there. The company has since completed another funding round and, for the first time, tech analyst Gartner has invited the organization to participate in a Magic Quadrant report.

Why CABs complete the trust equation

The cybersecurity company's transformation illustrates exactly why CABs are the missing piece in most AI strategies. They didn't just build better technology; they built it with their customers, creating advocates who became their competitive moat.

This focus is the core of a Boundless approach to AI: trust flows in both directions. When you apply the same transparency and collaboration frameworks internally across departments and externally with customers, you build something your competitors can't replicate, which is the foundation of the trust-driven ecosystem where AI adoption becomes inevitable rather than imposed.

The seven Boundless principles work because they recognize a fundamental truth: AI success isn't about the algorithms, it's about the relationships. Connection builds the foundation, Integration eliminates friction, Decentralization empowers teams, Mobility scales insights, Continuity sustains momentum, Autonomy enables innovation, and Holistic Success transforms your entire ecosystem.

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CABs aren't just feedback mechanisms; they're trust accelerators. When customers help design your AI strategy, they don't just buy your solution; they become part of your story. They evangelize not because you sold them, but because they co-designed something they believe in.

The choice is clear: continue building AI strategies behind closed doors and wonder why adoption stalls, or adopt a Boundless mindset that makes customers co-conspirators in your success. In a world where AI capabilities will quickly become commoditized, the companies that win will be those that have earned trust first.

The executives building AI in isolation today will be competing against organizations that will make their customers design partners tomorrow. The opportunity to create a Boundless brand is right in front of you. Because when your customers need strategic advice about AI, technology, or their business challenges, they'll call you first, not your competitors.

This article was co-authored by Irene Yam, author of Build a World-Class Customer Advisory Board: How To Create Deeper Relationships And Validate Strategies, founder of IY Media, and Customer Advisory Board program design, management, and facilitation expert.