What it takes to Trust AI at work

Prompting Trust publishes The Context: a briefing on how AI systems behave, where they fail, and what that means for the people accountable for them.

Mechanism first. Consequence second. No noise.

What is The Context?

Most coverage of AI tells you what happened. The Context picks a theme from what has happened, then works through how it occurred and what it implies for anyone making decisions about the systems involved.

It is not an aggregator, and it does not restate what you have read elsewhere. It does not predict the future of AI or argue a position on the technology. It explains the mechanism, illustrates it with selected scenarios, and leaves the judgement to you.

It began as part of my postgraduate research into AI, cyber and trust, and has grown into what you see now.

The name is literal. Prompting is the interface through which most people meet AI systems. Trust is how we decide whether those interactions are safe, reliable and worth acting on. Trust is what allows anything to operate at scale, and it is also fragile and routinely taken for granted.

Who writes it

David Hawks has spent more than twenty years across design, security and digital trust, leading cyber strategy and transformation programs in government, smart cities and the space sector.

He holds a distinction from Oxford Saïd Business School's AI for Business program, where he was awarded the prize for his final project on how AI is commoditising analytical capability in professional services.

His work focuses on how AI systems are designed to behave, how that behaviour is governed, and where the gap between the two creates risk. He writes as a practitioner: interested in mechanisms and evidence, not position-taking.

Longer arguments

Where an idea needs more room than a briefing allows, it goes to Synoptikon. The Context carries the opening and the reasoning that matters; the full piece sits there in one place

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