For a long time, when we’ve talked about trust at work, we’ve largely been talking about whether employees believe what their organisation tells them.
Do they trust their leaders? Do they believe the reasons given for a change? Do they feel the organisation is being open and honest? Do its actions match its words?
But AI may be introducing an entirely new dimension to that question.
Because increasingly, employees might not just be asking whether they believe what their leaders are saying. They may also need to ask:
Did my leader actually say it?
It sounds slightly dystopian. But perhaps not as much as we might think.
The Institute of Internal Communication’s August 2026 Impact Brief highlights deepfake fraud as an emerging workplace issue, warning that it is beginning to erode trust in work calls and video meetings.
And there are already some extraordinary real-world examples.
In 2024, an employee at engineering firm Arup joined what appeared to be a video call with the company’s CFO and several other colleagues. In reality, everyone else on the call was an AI-generated deepfake. The employee subsequently authorised transfers totalling around $25 million to the fraudsters.
Arup’s CIO later experimented with the technology himself and found he could create a basic real-time deepfake in around 45 minutes using readily available software.
That is obviously a cybersecurity story.
But we think there is an employee experience story here too.
Trust is already under pressure
The timing matters because we’re not introducing this technology into workplaces with limitless reserves of trust.
The IoIC’s 2026 IC Index, based on the views of 5,000 UK employees, found that trust in senior leaders has fallen nine percentage points in a year. Half of UK employees surveyed said they do not trust their CEO.
At the same time, AI is becoming increasingly embedded in how organisations operate and communicate. It can draft leadership messages, create images and video, replicate voices, summarise conversations and increasingly act on our behalf.
That creates an interesting contradiction.
Technology is making it easier than ever for organisations to create communication that looks and sounds authentic, at precisely the moment when authenticity may be becoming harder for employees to judge.
And that matters because trust is fundamental to employee experience.
If I receive a video message from my CEO, can I assume it’s really them? If my manager calls me with an unusual request, do I trust the voice I’m hearing? If a leader sends a beautifully written communication, am I hearing what they genuinely think or something generated for them?
Most everyday workplace communication won’t suddenly become fraudulent, of course. But the possibility changes something important.
For years, organisations have relied on visual and verbal cues as signals of authenticity. We recognise someone’s face. We hear their voice. We see them speaking directly to us.
Those signals may no longer be enough.
Perhaps authenticity is about to become more valuable, not less
There is a temptation to see the answer as another technology problem.
Better detection. Better verification. More sophisticated cybersecurity systems.
All of those things will undoubtedly matter. Organisations will need clear processes for verifying unusual or sensitive requests and employees will need to understand what to do when something doesn’t feel right.
But there is another part of the answer that has much less to do with technology.
It’s the quality of the relationships we build at work.
Think about the people you know well. You don’t recognise them purely because you know what their face looks like or what their voice sounds like. You know how they communicate. Their turns of phrase. The questions they tend to ask. What matters to them. How they behave when something is urgent. What feels characteristic and, sometimes more importantly, what doesn’t.
That’s a much richer form of trust.
And it may become increasingly valuable in a world where the superficial signals of authenticity can be replicated.
This creates a new challenge for internal communication
There is another implication here for organisations using AI themselves.
We are already seeing AI used to help leaders draft communications, create content and communicate at greater scale. There can be enormous value in that. Used thoughtfully, AI can help make communication clearer, more accessible and more inclusive.
But efficiency shouldn’t come at the expense of authenticity.
If every leadership message becomes perfectly polished, every communication follows the same AI-generated structure and every rough edge of someone’s natural communication style disappears, we may inadvertently make genuine communication feel less genuine.
There is some emerging thinking around exactly this. The World Economic Forum recently described an AI “believability gap”: the growing distance between how polished a leader sounds and how much people actually believe them.
Perhaps the challenge for internal communicators isn’t simply learning how to use AI to create more communication.
It’s helping organisations work out where AI adds value and where the human being needs to remain unmistakably present.
Designing for trust
This is where the conversation becomes an employee experience one.
Because trust isn’t created by a single communication channel or cybersecurity policy. It is created through hundreds of experiences over time.
It’s created when leaders say what they mean and do what they say. When employees can ask questions and get honest answers. When managers know their people well enough to notice when something isn’t right. When organisations explain how technology is being used rather than quietly introducing it. When people know where information has come from and where they can go to verify it.
And increasingly, we may need to design some of those signals of trust much more deliberately.
That could mean being clearer about which channels will be used for important organisational communication. Creating simple ways to verify unexpected requests. Being transparent when AI has played a significant role in creating content. Helping leaders retain their own voice when using AI. Creating more opportunities for genuine two-way human interaction rather than relying entirely on broadcast communication.
It also means building the kind of organisational culture where questioning something unusual isn’t seen as difficult or obstructive.
Because in a world of increasingly convincing synthetic content, “Are you sure this is real?” might actually be a very healthy question to ask.
The human response to an increasingly synthetic world
There is an understandable tendency to assume that as technology becomes more sophisticated, our response needs to become equally technological.
Sometimes it will.
But perhaps one of the most interesting consequences of AI is that it is making some very human things more valuable.
Relationships. Familiarity. Conversation. Judgement. Critical thinking. Psychological safety. Knowing the people we work with rather than simply recognising their profile picture on Teams.
None of this means organisations should fear AI. There are enormous opportunities to use it to make work better, and we’ve written plenty about those too.
But good employee experience has always been about understanding how changes in the world of work affect the people experiencing them.
Deepfakes might currently look primarily like a cybersecurity issue. But underneath sits a much bigger question about trust.
As the line between human and synthetic communication becomes harder to see, organisations may need to think much more deliberately about how employees know who and what they can trust.
Because the next challenge may not simply be whether employees believe what their organisation tells them.
It might be whether they can be sure who’s telling them at all.
Need help designing employee experiences that build trust, connection and confidence in a changing world of work? Get in touch with People Lab to find out how we can help.
