01/07/2026
As AI shifts from search assistant to decision-maker, what does trust need to become? ⬇️
At the AI in Business Conference, Gorden Pretorius, CTO at Checkatrade, explored one of the most important shifts now facing digital businesses: the move from search, recommendation and synthesis towards full intent completion.
The example was simple: someone asks AI to find them a plumber.
But the implications are huge.
As AI agents increasingly take on the work of comparing, choosing, booking and completing tasks, trust can no longer sit neatly as a feature within a platform. It becomes the infrastructure that determines whether a business is visible, credible and usable in the first place.
Gorden shared how Checkatrade is approaching this shift across three core pillars:
✅ AI-powered people: building AI literacy into every role and trusting teams to find meaningful use cases.
✅ AI-scaled operations: using AI to scale service and quality, while keeping humans focused on complex or high-stakes moments.
✅ AI-native products: designing for consumers, tradespeople, AI assistants and the interfaces that will sit between them.
One of the strongest takeaways was that the businesses best placed for this next era will not simply be the ones that automate fastest.
They will be the ones that make themselves worth automating into.
That means verified trust data, strong operating discipline, real workflows, and a clear understanding of where AI should help, and where human judgement still matters.
A huge thank you to Gorden Pretorius and Checkatrade for sharing such a practical and forward-looking perspective with our audience.
