Layla Angell unpacks the importance of comms for AI companies to build trust and reputation.
AI overtook fintech as Europe’s leading startup investment sector for the first time in 2025. The money is flowing, the companies are scaling, and the technology is reshaping all kinds of industries from legal services to financial infrastructure.
But… if you ask most people what they think about AI, you’ll get a different story – a perception shaped by big tech companies moving fast and breaking things, treating regulation as something to be worked around rather than worked with, and prioritising growth over everything else.
Some governments are adding to that story too, treating AI as a lever of state power. Anthropic had to suspend access to some of its most advanced models last month after the US government imposed export controls on them, restrictions that were lifted only a couple of weeks later. Some of the same companies building this technology seem more than willing to play along, so long as it keeps them onside with the administrations that can make or break their access to markets.
That perception isn’t entirely unfair when it comes to the largest players. In the past few weeks, OpenAI has been in talks with the Trump administration about handing over a 5% stake in the company. Nvidia and AMD have already agreed, since last year, to hand the US government a cut of their China chip revenue in return for export licences. None of it does much to convince a sceptical public that frontier AI is being built with their interests in mind.
But the problem is that this paints the entire sector with the same broad brush, including the hundreds of smaller, ambitious companies that are genuinely trying to do good and build something useful.
Last month, fake OpenAI adverts appeared on the London Underground. They were created by artist Darren Cullen, mimicking OpenAI’s branding with the tagline, “Yes, we built a machine that tells teenagers to kill themselves… but it might also help them with their homework.”
Whether you agree with the artist’s point or not, most commuters would never have known they were fake. In this environment, any company with AI in its name is vulnerable to having its reputation shaped by forces entirely outside its control. Yet the damage doesn’t stay with one company – it spreads across the sector.
Self-regulation and responsible AI frameworks are part of the answer to this question, but it’s worth noting a bit of a strange feature of this market: that there is now a booming sub-sector of AI companies building tools to regulate other AI companies.
We just can’t rely on AI to govern AI and expect the public to feel reassured by it. That’s not to knock on the AI industry as a whole – it’s a consequence of a small number of high-profile companies casting a shadow over everyone else, leaving good, responsible companies fighting a trust deficit they didn’t create. Governance tools are so necessary, but they’re not sufficient on their own. A compliance framework doesn’t tell your story either. It doesn’t explain to a regulator, a customer, or a sceptical journalist why your company is different from the ones making headlines for the wrong reasons.
Good communicators are already working on reassuring the public, in the AI sector and in politics. This is playing out here in the UK in real time – AI minister Kanishka Narayan has spent the past year trying to make the technology’s benefits legible to a public that mostly hears about job losses and copyright disputes. Andy Burnham, expected to become prime minister this summer, has called for tougher regulation of AI and big tech than Starmer.
Whatever you make of the politics, it points to space for a UK narrative on AI that’s distinct from how the US is currently writing (and rewriting) their own rules. That gap between the political narrative and the market realities is where individual companies can be caught out, since they’re left to explain where they stand while governments work out their positions.
For AI companies raising capital, entering new markets and competing for enterprise customers, reputation is a commercial asset. It affects how investors assess risk, how buyers shortlist vendors and how regulators decide who to scrutinise.
We work with high-growth AI and tech companies at exactly this stage, and we see the pattern: a strong product, growing fast, but no one outside their immediate market has heard of them – or the only public narrative about their sector is one shaped entirely by other companies many times their size.
Communications is what bridges that gap. It’s the difference between a business doing the right thing quietly and a business that can prove it publicly.
The AI sector doesn’t need yet another compliance dashboard – it needs credible stories told compellingly to the audiences that matter. That’s how they earn the recognition they deserve for the value they bring!