Proprietary Research Instrument
The AI Trust Ladder
A proprietary instrument that measures affluent client trust in AI-driven discovery, booking, advisory and personalization - task by task, segment by segment, repeatable as a tracker.
Your affluent clients are already using generative AI to discover, compare and decide - often well before your brand knows it’s happening. Meanwhile, most brands investing in AI-driven booking and advisory are acting on instinct, in a category where instinct is expensive to reverse.
Which tasks do your clients want an AI to perform, and which do they insist stay human?
How are you currently described when those same clients ask a generative engine about you?
Almost no brand in luxury can answer either question with evidence. This instrument answers both, from the same respondents, at the same time.
The AI Trust Ladder is a trade-off exercise built on choice-based conjoint and MaxDiff. It first identifies where affluent and high-net-worth clients want artificial intelligence involved and where they want a human, then links that finding to a generative-engine visibility module tracking how your brand is described. Fielded on verified affluent panels, cut by generation, wealth tier, and vertical, and repeatable as a standing tracker - quarterly.
How the instrument works
Four elements. The first is the core of the instrument - the others make it actionable.
The trade-off ladder at the center
The instrument is built around conjoint and MaxDiff trade-off tasks, because stated opinions about AI are unreliable and forced choices aren’t. A forced-choice trade-off produces a ranked ladder - the tasks where AI is welcome, the tasks where it’s tolerated, and the rung where trust drops. That rung is your finding.
The three segmentation cuts
Every result is cut three ways - by generation, wealth tier, and vertical. A thirty-two-year-old first-generation client and a sixty-eight-year-old inheritor are not on the same rung and never were, and trust doesn’t transfer from one vertical to another.
The generative-engine visibility module
This module audits how the major AI engines currently describe your brand, category, and named competitors - run as repeatable prompt-response sets, then linked statistically to purchase intent from the same respondents.
Fielding and sample
We field on verified affluent and high-net-worth panels, recruiting discreetly at the top wealth tiers where supply runs thin. Where a project calls for it, the sample is drawn from your own client and prospect pool instead of a general affluent panel.
Who this is built for
Four industries are moving fastest, and each one has a different task at stake.
Automotive
The configurator and the pre-purchase research journey now shape a rare, high-value decision. AI-driven discovery and comparison tools are where that journey begins, which makes trust at the discovery stage commercially decisive.
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Retail - Fashion and Beauty
Clienteling is the foundation of luxury retail, and houses are racing to automate parts of it. AI-driven styling and recommendation tools can feel like service at one price point and cheap at another. This finds exactly where that line sits.
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Hospitality
Hotels and resorts are rolling out AI concierge, pre-arrival personalization and in-room automation - without always knowing which guests welcome it and which find it intrusive. This measures HNWI and UHNWI attitudes toward AI adoption, and shows exactly where AI-mediated discovery earns its place in luxury travel.
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Financial Services & Wealth Management
AI in wealth management is now a board-level line item, yet few firms can say with evidence where investor trust holds and where it drops. AI-versus-human advice is the sharpest version of that question, because the advice carries real consequences.
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Why it matters
It replaces internal opinion with primary evidence at the exact moment your hardest-to-reverse AI decisions are being made.
It’s affluent and high-net-worth market research - never a general-population survey recut and relabeled for luxury.
It connects client trust and AI-mediated brand visibility in one dataset - two questions most tools in this market still answer separately, if at all.
It runs as a standing tracker, so a single study becomes a standing intelligence relationship.
Find out where your clients actually draw the line
Tell us which parts of your client journey you’re considering automating, and we’ll scope the instrument against it.