I want to gently push back on a word everyone’s throwing around right now: *transparency.*
I don’t think what audiences actually demand is total transparency, all the time, about everything. I think they demand something more specific — and more achievable. Consistency. And honesty in the interaction. Those two things are the real foundation of trust, and they’re worth pulling apart from each other.
Look at how different industries handle this, because it’s instructive.
The electronics world is transparent almost by force of nature. Manufacturers depend on a whole ecosystem of parts suppliers and researchers, so a sharp technology journalist can see eighteen, twenty-four months down the road — what chips are coming, what displays exist, where pricing is heading. Same with cars. You can look at the concept vehicles and the materials in development and reasonably guess what the lineup looks like in five to seven years. Movies and TV run on a version of this too. A producer isn’t going to spoil the third act — but they’ll happily tell you who’s directing, who’s starring, what it’s like on set. There’s an entire ecosystem of anticipation built around “what’s coming next,” and it keeps audiences leaning in.
Then there’s Apple.
Apple is famously, almost comically secretive about its product roadmap. You will not get a hint of what’s coming. And yet it’s one of the most trusted brands on the planet. How does that square?
Because Apple is radically transparent about a different thing. Walk into any Apple Store. Anyone can. You can film in there. There’s nothing to hide on the floor. And it’s remarkably hard to catch an Apple Store employee in an embarrassing moment, because they’ve been trained extraordinarily well to own whatever problem a customer walks in with — to keep it from escalating into the kind of viral scene the brand would then have to defend in the court of public opinion.
That’s the framework. It’s not “open everything” versus “hide everything.” It’s knowing exactly which doors to open — and standing fully behind whatever’s on the other side of the ones you do. You can absolutely draw a boundary around your unreleased strategy so a competitor doesn’t jump the queue. What you can’t do is use that boundary to obscure bad behavior. One is a reasonable business decision. The other is a liability waiting for daylight.
And now I have to bring up WeWork, because it’s the cautionary half of this.
WeWork built an empire on a story that didn’t match the numbers. We know now — it’s all in the public record since the collapse — that the company significantly inflated its actual metrics, and steamrolled real competitors by building relationships on data that was, at best, faulty. I sometimes wonder: if we’d had today’s AI tools back then, pattern-matching across all that public data, how much sooner would the gap have shown up?
That’s the part that should keep certain executives awake now. AI is exceptionally good at pattern-matching and at extrapolating from sources that have nothing directly to do with you. The next company that tries to wildly overstate its position in the market may very well get caught out — not by an investigative reporter digging through filings, but by a system that simply synthesizes the contradiction at scale.
So the framework comes down to a choice about what kind of company you want to be. If you’re genuinely building something valuable — real profits, real value for customers, the patient kind of growth rather than a stock run-up — then AI is going to be a *better* partner for you, because you’ll be able to tell your story with it and have nothing to fear when someone checks. Every company has some story a critic could try to leverage. What matters is whether it’s a single bad anecdote in one location, or something endemic — a real pattern someone can track and amplify.
Consistency is what you can promise and keep. Honesty in the interaction is what earns you the benefit of the doubt. Get those two right, and your story holds up from every angle someone might come at it — which, increasingly, is exactly what the machine is going to do.
