Trust infrastructure for the economy of the future.

The challenge

Ensuring claims are truthful

How do we know a claim about an object is true? The answer decides whether a medicine is pure, a food is safe to eat, an environmental claim is accurate, or a battery holds the materials its passport records.

Four developments are making that question harder to answer, and the cost of getting it wrong higher.

1. Artificial intelligence. AI systems are trained on large quantities of data and increasingly act on it, so their output is only as reliable as their data inputs.
2. Changing trade patterns. Geopolitical shifts are reshaping supply chains, and new trading partners are replacing old ones. Trust that once built up over decades now has to be established quickly, at a distance, between parties with no shared history.
3. The circular economy. Reusing, repairing, or recycling a product requires reliable information about what it contains and how it was made, and that information has to travel with the object through its whole life.
4. Scrutiny of how things are made. Buyers, regulators, and the public want verified answers about forced and child labour, carbon emissions, and water use. None of it is visible in the finished product.

What we do

WITO works with stakeholders to improve the world's economic trust infrastructure by developing and maintaining governance frameworks for the verification of trustworthy credentials concerning physical and digital objects, and by coordinating mutual recognition between digital trust frameworks operating across jurisdictions, sectors, and standards.

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Economic trust infrastructure is the interconnected digital technologies and certification processes that make a claim about a product credible to someone who cannot verify it themselves. As our economies become more reliant on credible data, this infrastructure is becoming essential.

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Publications

Participation