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Key takeaways:
- Trust and Safety is moving from a reactive operating function to a strategic capability embedded across product design, governance, operations, and ecosystem partnerships.
- AI agents, physical AI, synthetic reality, and machine-speed manipulation are expanding the scope of Trust and Safety beyond traditional platform and content risks.
- Organizations need more adaptive models for engagement, detection, enforcement, oversight, and accountability as AI reshapes digital and physical experiences.
- Trust should be designed earlier, measured with greater precision, and governed more continuously.
- Leaders that adapt operating models now can be better positioned to manage rising risk, meet stakeholder expectations, and build confidence.
Trust and Safety (T&S) is becoming more complex, more interconnected, and more central to business resilience. As AI accelerates the speed and scale of digital interaction—and moves into products, workplaces, and physical environments—organizations are facing new expectations to protect users, govern emerging technologies, and build trusted experiences across platforms, products, and communities.
PwC’s Trust and Safety Outlook 2026 research, which surveyed 2,000 US adults aged 18 years old or older, found that Trust and Safety needs to move from a reactive operating function to a strategic capability embedded across product design, governance, operations, and ecosystem partnerships. This report explores seven trends shaping that shift:
- From engagement to impact: making community input count in product, policy, and enforcement decisions
- Child safety in the age of AI: helping platforms navigate evolving harms, regulatory scrutiny, and rising expectations from parents, guardians, and young users
- AI agents as workforce counterparts: what governance should look like
- Physical AI governance: managing risks as AI-enabled devices move from screens into shared physical spaces
- The future of content moderation: shifting from scaled review capacity to specialized expertise, intelligence, and partner ecosystems
- Agentic AI in Trust and Safety operations: reinventing operating models through evaluator agents, autoraters, and AI-led workflows
- AI-shaped Trust and Safety risk: preparing for synthetic reality, autonomous malicious agents, and coordinated manipulation at machine speed
Together, these trends point to a new reality for Trust and Safety leaders: Trust should be designed earlier, measured with greater precision, and governed more continuously. Organizations that adapt their operating models now can be better positioned to manage rising risk, meet stakeholder expectations, and build confidence in the next generation of digital, AI-enabled, and physical experiences.
We invite you to explore what’s next—and what’s possible—for Trust and Safety in 2026 and beyond.
Trust and Safety Outlook 2026
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