National AI Day and the Case for Trust
July 16th is National AI Day. I will admit I did not know that until recently. But Jon Swartz did, and he wrote a thoughtful piece for Techstrong.ai about why we might actually need one. Reading it, I found myself returning to the theme that anchors so much of how I think about this technology: trust.
Trust is the word that keeps surfacing every time the conversation about AI gets serious. And it is not only about the data a model was trained on, or how the model was built, or how it behaves in production, though all of that matters enormously. It is also about something harder to engineer: the public’s willingness to believe that AI is being deployed in service of people rather than at their expense.
That willingness is fragile right now, and for understandable reasons. You do not have to look far to see AI cast as the villain. The anxiety is real, and it is rooted in real things.
The Fears Are Not Irrational
Consider the landscape as an ordinary person experiences it. Data centers are being built in regions already struggling with drought. Farm workers are being displaced by autonomous machinery. Students are “writing” essays they never wrote. Lawyers are submitting briefs with citations to cases that do not exist. Mass layoffs are attributed, fairly or not, to AI replacing human workers. Cyber criminals are impersonating people’s grandchildren in fabricated moments of distress. Deepfakes are putting words in the mouths of celebrities, political candidates, and even schoolteachers. Hiring algorithms are quietly reproducing the biases of the past. And AI is finding its way into the machinery of war.
Told as a single list, it reads like a case for fear. And the data suggests the public is registering it. As Swartz reports, new survey findings from Kinsta reveal that 62 percent of consumers say customer service has gotten worse because of AI, a figure that jumped more than twenty percentage points in a single year. When the most common daily encounter people have with AI leaves them feeling worse rather than better, the trust deficit is not a perception problem. It is a lived experience.
But the Case for AI Is Just as Real
Here is what tends to get lost in the fear. AI is already woven, quietly and beneficially, into an enormous amount of ordinary life. It is in your car and your phone. It is in your fitness watch, your restaurant reservation, your hospital visit, your travel. It is in the systems that keep you connected and the systems that keep you safe. In a remarkable number of places, AI is essentially invisible, and it simply works.
That invisibility is worth sitting with. The AI people fear is the AI they notice: the hallucinating chatbot, the deepfake, the layoff announcement. The AI that works is the AI they never think about at all. The challenge for the entire industry is closing the distance between those two experiences.
Where This Connects to the Work We Do
At NextStar Venture Partners, we invest in AI for critical industries, including health, energy, agriculture, advanced manufacturing, and cybersecurity. These are precisely the sectors where trust is not a marketing concept but a functional requirement. An AI system deployed in a hospital, an electrical grid, or a food supply chain does not get the benefit of the doubt, nor should it. It has to earn its place through reliability, transparency, and demonstrable benefit to the people who depend on it.
That is why the trust conversation matters so much to how we evaluate founders. The companies we are most interested in are not the ones promising the flashiest capabilities. They are the ones solving narrow, well-defined problems in ways that are accountable and verifiable. Swartz’s article makes a similar point through the voices of the operators he interviews: the durable value of AI is showing up not in the glamorous consumer demos, but in the unglamorous, high-stakes back offices of regulated industries, where the inputs are structured and the results can be measured. That is exactly the terrain NextStar was built to invest in.
Let’s Celebrate It Anyway
So yes, let’s mark National AI Day. Let’s celebrate the things we love about AI, be honest about the things we hate, and stay clear-eyed about the things we know we still have to fix. Trust is earned in that honesty, not in spite of it.
And since so much of the world beyond U.S. borders is grappling with exactly the same questions, I would happily see this become something bigger than a national observance. Make it International AI Day. The conversation about trust does not stop at any border, and neither should the work of getting it right.
