Borrowed Trust: What AI Marketing Asks of Users
Abhishek Agrawal, Founder
Landed in India, jet-lagged in a cab under a flyover, and a Shah Rukh Khan billboard got me thinking.
Google Gemini: "Ab Dost Hai Saath, Khul Ke Karo Baat." Now a friend is by your side, speak openly.
There is a whole campaign behind this with practical use cases. But the billboard is what sticks in people's minds, and what it says is: open up.
SRK doesn't just bring reach. He brings decades of being India's most emotionally available screen presence. That is a specific kind of trust to lend an AI product, and it is being lent by an advertising company asking hundreds of millions of people to speak freely.
The part that gets less airtime: safety tuning is overwhelmingly English-centric. So a model's tendency to just agree with you is likely sharper in Hindi and regional languages, exactly the market this campaign is built for.
A guide, sure. A dost, I'm not convinced. For anyone deploying AI to customers, the lesson carries over: the trust your product borrows sets the bar your safeguards have to meet.