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Today’s T&S professionals face competing expectations to lower costs and create greater elasticity despite growing regulatory demands. T&S organizations that grew rapidly to address broad compliance needs and escalating volumes now encounter calls to increase operational focus and efficiency. To meet this challenge, leading T&S organizations drive cost effectiveness at scale through organizational change, risk prioritization and AI-driven tooling.
Proactivity is critical. Instead of waiting to receive cost-saving demands, leaders should employ three key T&S efficiency principles:
- Drive efficiency by design: Improve processes with early T&S engagement during design and by organizing for efficient enforcement.
- Shift to an efficiency mindset: Lead a cultural shift that recalibrates cost and risk tolerance.
- Use innovative trust tools: Integrate tooling, including AI, to augment operations.
Drive efficiency by design: Improve process and organizational structure
Embedding T&S into the early stages of product design helps teams move faster — with fewer late-stage disruptions. When T&S professionals are engaged upfront, organizations can take a safety-by-design approach: treating safety as a core business requirement rather than a compliance checkbox. This shift in timing helps reduce the likelihood of downstream risks that can lead to user trust breaches, reputational fallout or launch delays. By reframing early T&S engagement as an enabler of growth — not a barrier — leaders can unlock operational agility and strengthen the foundation for trusted innovation.
Organize the T&S function for future efficiency: Organizations that grow quickly often prioritize market share capture at the expense of process clarification and central alignment. The resulting siloed structures may contribute to inefficient development life cycles and duplicative processes. For example, due to the rapid increase in spend on T&S after the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal, many T&S organizations scaled reactively — and inefficiently.1 T&S functions should proactively seek to rectify this issue before facing cuts from external leaders.
T&S leaders should address structural challenges through:
- T&S functional integrations between central T&S policy and legal teams as well as their product or business unit counterparts
- Flexible collaboration enables business units to consistently interpret intentionally vague companywide policy set by the central group. Doing so upfront leads to better response speed and customer experience.
- T&S Centers of Excellence (COEs) that further optimize operations by establishing centralization in cost effective locations with specialized talent and relevant skill sets
- COEs alleviate the need for product organizations to source specialized talent.
Shift to an efficiency mindset: Rebalancing cost and risk tolerance
Lead a cultural change toward cost effectiveness. As Trust and Safety organizations adapt to cost-mindfulness, success often depends on strong leadership driving cultural-mindset shifts tailored approaches to fit the company’s identity. Transformations need clear, central goals ––and increased cost sensitivity to T&S is no different.
To promote clarity, leaders should:
- Set the tone from the top to prevent ambiguity around the “what, why and how much” will at best delay execution and at worst lead to broader friction or resentment.
- Establish clear goals connecting cost to outcomes, weighing core strategic objectives and capabilities against budgets.
- Consider company identity when tailoring a transformational approach:
- Social media firms can limit content moderation to the most severe violations, then crowdsource or automate the rest, thereby reducing Opex.2
- Many companies, regardless of industry, should carefully consider where reduced enforcement may allow violations and potentially result in damage to enterprise relationships, regulatory penalties or brand risk.
- Shift the risk mindset to prioritize investment. Fostering a cost-efficiency culture requires risk tolerance recalibration, a standardized approach to investment prioritization, operational transparency via metrics, and talent retooling.
- Recalibrate risk tolerance to help fend off unsustainable spend via a rigorous, standardized evaluation process and framework.
- Some focus demand areas include:
- Nature of risk (e.g., reputational, regulatory)
- Immediacy of need (e.g., tied to active issue or preventative only)
- Financial or business consequences (e.g., revenue, clients, ops)
- Long-term strategic need (to business partners or T&S priorities)
- Actual incident or enforcement rate (real-world utility of a policy)
- Complexity (opportunity for cross-utilization or automation)
- Some focus demand areas include:
- Standardize investment prioritization by weighing the criteria above, tiering demands to prioritize spending against tradeoffs, while building shared insights (e.g., between T&S teams and business partners).
For example, this has led some companies to reduce content moderation for their highest tier clients, to jointly prioritize revenue and reduction of lower-risk review. - Foster operational transparency using accurate data to support T&S investment prioritization and defend its importance. Key success requirements are:
- Uniform metrics (in definition and application) across T&S groups
- High accuracy and coverage, such as for new product launches
- Active employment of the data in the right use cases
- Active engagement of partners for required details (e.g., on revenue impacts)
- Bridge the skill gap. New or upskilled talent is often required as many T&S personnel come from vendor management, contracting or legal backgrounds but may lack a program management mindset. Adopting these practices can help:
- Enable focus on designing best-fit solutions tied to policy needs at the outset, as opposed to reactive engagement.
- Find ways to share or apply previously successful designs, tools or approaches.
- Identify opportunities for T&S to “shift left” and advise upstream teams (e.g., product, R&D) on early inputs to reduce downstream volumes and effort.
Use innovation tools: Deploy AI as an enabler at scale
T&S organizations should leverage new tooling opportunities to enhance operations, integrating tooling-driven design into their processes and workflows. Future T&S organizations can be cost-efficient with AI as a force — an efficiency — multiplier across the value chain. AI can perform low-complexity work and augment performance in critical areas like content moderation, which increasingly relies on AI over human agents. In fact, newly developed AI models can detect toxic content with accuracy as high as 87%.3
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Driving cost efficiency for Trust and Safety operations is challenging. Legacy organizational structures and processes, built to service the regulatory environment of the past, will often require redesign to serve the business and regulatory environments of the future. The very institutional culture and mindset may require change, with updated approaches to risk tolerance and rebalancing existing investments. New tooling options require heavy upfront investment to secure long-term benefits. Collectively, these challenges may dissuade some leaders from pursuing necessary changes. However, PwC has experience employing the principles and practices detailed in this outlook at some of the world's largest technology and retail companies. We have seen how enterprise-level transformation, with the right approach and leadership, can drive trusted efficiency.
Trust and Safety Outlook 2025
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