Rachel Botsman

Rachel Botsman is a leading expert, author and global authority on trust in the modern world. She has an insatiable curiosity to understand concepts that are core to how humans think, act and create.

By distilling complex ideas into clear and compelling content, she gives us the tools to understand trust – what it means, how it works and why it’s essential for every aspect of our lives.

A leading expert in the field, she has written three influential books—What’s Mine Is Yours, Who Can You Trust?, and How to Trust & Be Trusted—translated into 14 languages. She has been recognised as one of the world’s top 30 most influential management thinkers and honoured as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

As a former Trust Fellow at Oxford University, Rachel teaches leaders and entrepreneurs how to navigate trust in technology, work cultures, and society. Her TED Talks have been viewed over five million times, and her insights regularly appear in the media, including The New York Times, WIRED, Harvard Business Review and The Financial Times. She also engages with over 90,000 subscribers through her popular newsletter, Rethink with Rachel.

As the go-to voice on trust, Rachel Botsman has an insightful and engaging media presence across channels, including the BBC, CNN, NPR, and ABC. Rachel is the host of Trust Issues – a podcast that explores trust through the lenses of popular culture, politics, business and psychology.

Rachel’s awards include:
• World’s Top 30 Management Thinkers, Thinkers50
• Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum
• Best Independent Newsletter, Finalist, Webby’s
• Top 100 Most Creative People in Business, Fast Company
• Women of the Year, ‘The Progressive Voice’ InStyle
• ‘10 Ideas That Will Change The World’, Time
• Breakthrough Idea Award, Thinkers50
• Top 10 Most Influential Voices, LinkedIn
• HR Most Influential Thinkers, HR Magazine
• Top 20 Speakers in the World, Monocle
• Finalist, CEO Book Awards
• ‘Change’ Book of the Year, Finalist, Business Book Awards
• Interview of the Year, Finalist, British Podcast Awards
• Business Podcast of the Year, British Podcast Awards

With a Fine Arts degree from the University of Oxford, Rachel Botsman brings her concepts to life into the realm of art and design. Her work reimagines historical artifacts to examine our evolving relationship with work and society. Roots of Trust, a surface reflections installation, will be exhibited at the London Design Biennale 2025.

Based in Oxford, Rachel enjoys gardening, running, and spending time with her family and dog. She has worked on every continent except Antarctica.

Monocle selected Rachel Botsman as one of twenty top speakers to have at your conference. She has spoken to thousands of people at companies, governments and public events as diverse as Xero, Google, Accenture, Goldman Sachs, Salesforce, The Drucker Forum, Clinton Global Initiative, World Economic Forum and many others.

Known for her clear insights and warm storytelling, Rachel’s TED talks have been viewed more than five million times and audiences consistently rate her as the top keynote speaker at global events and conferences.

By forming an immediate — and lasting — connection with those in the room, Rachel Botsman’s presentations resonate long after the final word.

Rachel adapts her keynote speeches to each client’s requirements and event themes, however popular speeches include:

#1: Leading with Trust in Uncertain Times
When the world feels complex and fast-moving, trust becomes a powerful source of clarity and confidence. It gives people the courage to take smart risks, collaborate across teams, and lean into change instead of resisting it.

Yet despite how often we use the word, trust is still clouded by myths. In this keynote, Rachel deconstructs those misconceptions and invites audiences to rethink trust as something they can actively shape.

With her ‘Risk–Trust Lens’ framework, she shows why the balance between risk and trust is the hallmark of adaptive leadership and shares practical tools leaders can use to build cultures where people feel safe, supported, and ready to step into the unknown.

#2: Trust by Design: What Makes Innovation Stick
Why do some innovations fail while others succeed? The difference is rarely the technology; it’s whether people trust it enough to make the leap. Every breakthrough depends on what Rachel calls a Trust Leap: the decision to embrace a new way of working, creating, or connecting.

Yet too often, innovators obsess over features and functions and overlook the trust conditions that truly determine adoption. Drawing on 15 years of work with Fortune 500 companies and start-ups, Rachel shares her ‘Trust Leap’ framework, showing why designing for trust is as essential as designing for usability or beauty.

Through stories that span from historical inventions to today’s disruptive start-ups, she reveals how trust is the hidden design layer that allows ideas to take root and grow.

#3 – Rethinking the New Rules of Trust & AI
AI is rapidly reshaping how we make decisions, create, work, and even trust one another. But here’s the challenge: most of the questions about trust and AI are framed incorrectly.

The real issue is not whether people should trust AI, but how we design AI systems to be genuinely trustworthy. Rachel uses her ‘Trust Shift’ framework to show how every major leap in history has required new forms of trust, and why AI marks a fundamentally different moment that forces us to rethink the rules altogether.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Clients often ask about purchasing books for giveaways and delegate packs. Below you’ll find a selection of products by Rachel Botsman. Click the images to view on Amazon's website. For bulk orders, please speak with your Booking Agent.