62 - Adrian Blair, CEO at Trustpilot

I'm great. Thanks, Jared. Really happy to be here.

Well, I think the best way to understand us is as the largest independent customer feedback platform in the world. Businesses use us to listen to their customers to get real authentic human feedback and people use us to make choices. And you know, you choose where to spend your money. You want to spend it with companies that you can trust. Our platform hosts more than 300 million reviews. Every day around 200,000 new reviews are submitted to the platform. Those are across countries. They're across different verticals. And we're also a really exciting commercial proposition in the sense that we're a listed business on the London Stock Exchange. We were the Footsie 250 company of the year in 2024. And we're not an ad funded business model. We're a SaaS business. We have all kinds of products that help businesses really understand and engage with the feedback that they're receiving. We're a team of about a thousand people around the world. The business originally started in Denmark, but our fastest growing market is now the US because what we're seeing is nothing like Trustpilot really exists in the states and a lot of companies are just seeing a huge need for what we do.

Yeah. So just one observation speaking to different CEOs of companies is you ask any CEO of a business is trust important to your company and universally you'll hear that the answer is yes and actually in many cases a CEO would say not only is trust important it's actually the most important thing you know, without trust society itself just collapses. And there's an old Chinese saying I think that if you've got a choice of weapons or food or trust and you have to give one up, you would give weapons up first, food up second, and trust up last. So trust is like the most important thing according to most leaders. And yet the striking thing is how little understood it is. You know, if you think of how well a typical chief executive will understand the financials of their business, you've got a whole department in your company that's dedicated to helping you understand the financials. You've got all your financial statements and everything. So trust is super important. It's little understood and that's really where Trustpilot comes in. We're really helping businesses to get as many authentic customer voices as possible to present those voices publicly through our review platform. And it's that act of being transparent and out in the open with feedback that really starts to foster trust. And then we're giving folks the tools to really engage with it and understand it. Of course, the dimension AI brings to that is it's a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it's easy to just replicate fake content and there's tons of people out there trying to do that and just mislead effectively using AI. But at the same time, AI gives you the means to understand what people are really saying in a way that was never possible before and really engage with it effectively. So our basic view is that if AI is fueled by actual authentic human experiences, if it's people's real authentic voices that are the inputs into AI, then it's AI that listens before it speaks. And we think that's incredibly powerful.

So we're already using AI right across what we do. But to give you a few specific examples. We have businesses on Trustpilot who have literally millions of reviews just of their own business. So we use AI to help those companies understand what users are really saying. The company with the most reviews on Trustpilot, I think, has four and a half million different people's opinions of their business. It's quite hard manually to understand what four and a half million different reviews are saying to you. So obviously AI could be really powerful in crunching together all of that information to say look here are the things that are driving trust with your customers. Here are the things they like. Here are the things that they don't like. So that you can actually start becoming a better business as a result. That's one tangible way that we're using it with businesses. With our own internal operations, obviously getting 200,000 new reviews every day of different companies around the world presents a challenge. We've got to decide what content is genuine and makes it onto the platform and what content doesn't comply with our rules for some reason and we shouldn't present to start with. We found with AI, we've become much more sophisticated about how we do that.

Well I think fundamentally what businesses need to do is engage with more of their customers. You know what we see happen if you're not careful is that there is a lot of talk about your business whatever your business is people will be talking about it on X on Tik Tok on Facebook Instagram all over the place. What we recommend companies do is proactively ask your customers to leave you feedback on our platform and it makes it really easy to do that in a way that's out in the open, transparent in public because the danger is if you're not proactively asking lots of your customers to leave feedback, the danger is that a sort of disgruntled minority on social media end up coloring everyone's impression of your business. So that's a basic tip I have is use obviously as CEO of Trustpilot I recommend our platform for this but use Trustpilot to engage with your customers get them to leave feedback on our platform and then it's there in the open for everyone to see that helps you build trust with your business it helps you understand what's going on so that you can actually reflect it in your operations and become a better company. And also what we see companies increasingly doing is if you've got a good rating on Trustpilot, let's say you're rated 4.5 stars, you want to shout about that. You want to tell people that you're rated four and a half stars on Trustpilot. So we're starting to see people putting it in their TV ads, for example, because if you've got a TV media budget, why not make it go further by actually including a Trustpilot rating that says we're a good company? And the difference between using a trustpilot rating to say you're good versus just saying we're good is that people actually believe you.

Totally. I mean we see it all the time. I live in London and if you travel around London, you will see our brand every single time you go out. And as you say, it's a great feeling for us as folks who work for Trustpilot because that shows that we're doing something that's helpful. Companies are doing that because they've invested a lot in their reputation and they want that investment to pay off. And of course, consumers find it helpful as well because it's a way to distinguish which companies they can trust from the ones that maybe they can't.

Well, we saw without us really doing anything that a lot of folks in the US were using Trustpilot, a lot of businesses were getting feedback through our platform and it was that that led us to start setting up offices. We've got a big office in New York couple of hundred people. We've got an office in Denver servicing the West Coast. So we've had folks on the ground in the US for many years now. And as I said, it's now our fastest growing market. We've got some huge companies in the US using our service right across verticals, from telos like Verizon to financial services businesses like Western Union or technology like GoDaddy. Huge variety of businesses across verticals just all using us really for the same thing which is build trust with your customers, use the insight to become a better business, and if you've got great feedback use it to help your business grow.

Time flies when you're having fun, Jared.

So look, we what we announced at the human next show where we met a few weeks ago in Las Vegas is a product called trust layer and what that's all about is giving businesses access not just to their own feedback but to all 300 million plus reviews across our platform. And what we're seeing is there's a lot of use cases for that kind of information. So we've got, for example, investment firms saying, 'Wow, knowing what 300 million folks have said about companies is actually quite useful if you're in the business of picking companies to put your capital into.' Or we've seen consultancies saying we would really like to understand customer service in this particular industry so that when we're trying to help clients in this industry we have something to benchmark them against. So we've seen many many use cases of all these trustpilot reviews and what we're doing is we're packaging that up into an API product called trust layer that gives folks access to that information and also to the kind of fire hose of new reviews, new bits of customer feedback as they come onto the platform. We think it's also great for businesses who are already on Trustpilot because it means that you're being recognized. If you've got a great Trustpilot rating, then you're getting credit for that well beyond your existing business. And if you're someone who's written feedback on Trustpilot, your voice is being heard because people don't want to shout into a vacuum. They want people to actually pay attention to the feedback that they're leaving. So that's something that this trust layer product will help to do as well.

Thank you. Thanks a lot Jared.