I've spent more than twenty-five years working in technology, and I keep seeing the same pattern: the biggest improvements in business productivity and economic progress come when common challenges become shared infrastructure.
In the 1990s, organisations struggled to connect systems that didn't speak to each other. Networks and open standards solved much of that problem.
In the 2000s, the required computing power became too expensive and complex for every organisation to manage alone. Cloud computing turned it into a shared service.
In the 2010s, the challenge shifted to validation of identity. Before organisations could interact digitally, they needed confidence in who—or what—was on the other end of the connection. Identity systems and modern cryptography became foundational services for the internet.
There is a pattern. Once something becomes fundamental enough, we stop rebuilding it inside every organisation and treat it as infrastructure.
Which brings me to what I believe is the next challenge: Over the last decade, while working on privacy, identity and data governance through Gwirio, I've become convinced that one capability never made that transition - Trust.
Every organisation establishes trust for itself. It performs its own verification, collects its own evidence, applies its own policies and reaches its own conclusions, even when another trusted organisation has already done the same work.
That model is already inefficient when people make every decision. As AI begins acting on our behalf, it becomes a structural limitation.
Over the coming weeks I'll explore a simple idea : Trust Infrastructure may become the next foundational layer of the digital economy.
Which leads me to a simple conclusion. “Trust precedes transaction.”