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PwC at TrustCon 2026 

July 20–22, 2026 | San Francisco, California 

AI is changing faster than the systems designed to govern it. As autonomy expands across products, operations, and physical environments, leaders face a harder question: What still holds, what no longer does, and where are the next pressure points emerging?

AI is scaling faster than trust. What breaks first—and what needs to evolve next?

For years, Trust and Safety focused largely on content, platforms, and online harms. That conversation is changing. AI agents, autonomous systems, and machine-speed interactions are pushing trust and safety into broader questions of accountability, resilience, governance, and institutional trust.

As AI becomes embedded across products, operations, and physical environments, current models are beginning to show strain. Who is accountable when AI systems act autonomously? How should decisions made at machine speed be governed? And which assumptions no longer hold as AI pushes today’s trust systems beyond their original design?

PwC at TrustCon 2026 brought these questions together in one place: an executive roundtable, a Birds of a Feather reception, a featured fireside discussion, and a live demonstration of AI-powered Trust and Safety operations. Explore the ideas, perspectives, and practical models shaping what comes next.

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AI is scaling faster than trust. What breaks first—and what

At TrustCon 2026, PwC brought together senior leaders across trust and safety, AI, policy, product, risk, and governance for an exclusive Executive Roundtable and Birds of a Feather networking reception in San Francisco. The conversations explored the findings from PwC's Trust and Safety Outlook 2026, examining how trust and safety is evolving from a reactive function into a strategic capability embedded across product design, governance, operations, and ecosystem partnerships.

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TrustCon 2026 highlights

Inside PwC at TrustCon 2026 

At the center of PwC’s TrustCon 2026 program: candid exchange among leaders across Trust and Safety, policy, product, risk, and AI. The experience spans an executive roundtable, a Birds of a Feather reception at Sens, live music, a featured fireside discussion, and an interactive demonstration of AI-powered Trust and Safety operations.

  • Dan Hays, Strategy & Policy Consulting Leader, PwC US 
  • Rob Reich, Professor of Social Ethics of Science and Technology, Stanford University 
  • Eric Goldman, Professor of Law and Co-Director, High Tech Law Institute, Santa Clara University 
  • Rachel Roschelle, Director, Regulatory & Policy Strategy, Strategy&, PwC US

The discussion examines what holds, what strains, and where the next pressure points are emerging as AI pushes today’s trust systems beyond their original design.

Continue the conversation through PwC’s Trust and Safety Outlook 2026. 

Explore the Outlook

PwC’s Trust and Safety Outlook 2026

Seven trends for leaders navigating AI-era risk.

PwC’s Trust and Safety Outlook 2026 explores how Trust and Safety is moving from a reactive operating function to a strategic capability embedded across product design, governance, operations, and ecosystem partnerships. 
 
Drawing on PwC’s 2026 Trust and Safety Survey of 2,000 US adults and our experience working with leading organizations, the Outlook examines seven trends shaping the next phase of Trust and Safety in the AI era.

The report focuses on seven trends shaping that shift:

  • Community input and platform governance 

  • Child safety in the age of AI 

  • AI agents as workforce counterparts 

  • Physical AI governance 

  • Content moderation from scale to specialization

  • Agentic AI in Trust and Safety operations 

  • Emerging AI threats and Trust and Safety risk

Together, these trends point to a new reality: trust should be designed earlier, measured with greater precision, and governed more continuously as AI reshapes digital, physical, and institutional experiences.

AI-powered Trust and Safety in action

PwC’s autorater demonstration shows how AI-powered annotation agents can evaluate complex content against policy, generate transparent rationales and confidence scores, and route higher-risk cases for expert review. 
 
Together, these capabilities point to a faster, more scalable operating model that can improve quality, reduce costs, and adapt as policies and risks evolve. The demonstration translates agentic AI from concept into a practical model for Trust and Safety operations.

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The Future of Trust and Safety in the Age of AI

AI is reshaping trust and safety—from how online harms emerge and spread to how platforms detect, evaluate and respond to them. Ben Whitelaw, founder and editor of Everything in Moderation and co-host of the Control Alt Speech podcast, joins Daniel Hays, PwC’s Strategy & Policy Consulting Leader, for a conversation on key themes from PwC’s Trust and Safety Outlook 2026.

37:43
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PwC's Trust and Safety Outlook 2026

AI is reshaping trust and safety—changing the speed and scale of risk while creating new opportunities for organizations to operate more effectively. Daniel Hays, PwC’s Strategy & Policy Consulting Leader, shares perspectives from PwC’s Trust and Safety Outlook 2026.

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Building Trust Through Community Engagement

As AI and emerging technologies become more integrated into everyday life, meaningful community engagement can help organizations better understand the people their products and policies affect.

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Protecting Children in an Evolving Digital World

As technology and AI become a bigger part of how young people learn, connect and interact, child safety is creating new questions for parents, technology companies and governments.

3:51
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Physical AI: The Next Frontier for Trust and Safety

The Next Frontier for Trust and Safety: AI is moving beyond screens and into the physical world. From autonomous vehicles and robotics to AI-assisted healthcare, physical AI is creating new possibilities—and new questions around safety, accountability and trust. In this conversation, PwC leaders explore what happens as AI agents and intelligent systems gain the ability to make decisions and take action in physical environments.

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How AI Is Reshaping Content Moderation

AI is changing the way trust and safety teams approach content moderation — from the skills practitioners need to the mix of suppliers and technology supporting their operations. PwC’s Daniel Hays sits down with Rahul Kapoor and William Herren to discuss how organizations are moving beyond traditional human-led content moderation models, the growing importance of AI fluency, and the role of agentic AI and specialized expertise in the trust and safety team of the future.

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Modernizing Trust & Safety Operations with AI

As trust and safety organizations face pressure to operate more efficiently, AI is creating new opportunities to rethink how teams identify, prioritize and address online harms. PwC’s Daniel Hays speaks with Glen Wise and Rahul Kapoor about the shift toward AI-enabled trust and safety operations, including how organizations can define the right policies and data, determine where to focus their resources, manage organizational change and build trust in new agentic technologies.

3:55
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3 Emerging Threats Reshaping Trust & Safety

Synthetic reality, autonomous agents and coordinated misinformation are creating a new generation of challenges for trust and safety organizations. PwC’s Daniel Hays and Kim David Greenwood discuss three emerging threats highlighted in PwC’s 2026 Trust and Safety Outlook and how AI is changing the speed, scale and autonomy of harmful activity. They explore how organizations can strengthen their strategies, policies, processes and technology; use AI to respond to misinformation and manipulation; and apply approaches such as scenario planning and red teaming to anticipate emerging threats.

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Daniel Hays

Daniel Hays

Principal, Consulting Solutions, PwC US

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