We're in a trust recession – AI is making it worse, with Alice Sesay Pope.

In the latest episode of theDigital Banking Podcast, host Josh DeTar of Tyfone welcomed Alice Sesay Pope, a customer experience executive and author who spent her career transforming service organizations at Capital One, Visa, USAA, and Amazon. Pope trained as a chemical engineer before moving into financial services, where she learned to pair rigorous process design with the soft skills that let frontline employees actually help people. Pope described the current moment as a "trust recession," pointing to Pew Research showing that the population using generative AI tools the most also trusted it the least. She and DeTar traced how quickly usage grew anyway, citing a TD Bank survey in which the share of consumers using AI to help with their finances jumped from 10% in 2025 to 55% in 2026. DeTar shared his own experience with SoFi repeatedly pitching him student loan refinancing despite never having attended college, an example Pope used to illustrate how disconnected data could be from an actual customer relationship. The conversation turned to what financial institutions could do about it: building an enterprise-wide view of the customer instead of operating in departmental silos, offering secure and accurate generative AI tools of their own so members did not have to hand statements to outside platforms, and knowing when a human interaction mattered more than an automated one. Pope closed by connecting the discussion back to her book, The Trust Algorithm, and her belief that institutions willing to build the right guardrails could still earn back the trust AI had put at risk.