The Trust Knob: How AI Is Changing the Way Companies Make Decisions

What if the most important decision your company makes this year isn’t made by a human at all?

In this episode of The Cred Podcast, Mack McKelvey sits down with serial entrepreneur Brian Kathman, CEO of OpsCanvas, to unpack one of the most underexplored frontiers in AI: decision memory. 

Brian has been building companies since 1999 — from the world’s first transactional online bank to mobile messaging long before the iPhone existed — and now he’s tackling the question keeping enterprise leaders up at night: when do we trust AI to make the call?

Brian introduces the concept of the “context graph” — the trillion-dollar missing layer that Foundation Capital calls the key to unlocking AI in production — and explains why 90% of enterprise AI initiatives are stuck in proof of concept. Spoiler: it’s a trust problem, not a technology problem.

They also dig into the “trust knob,”  the idea that handing decisions to AI isn’t a binary switch but a dial, and that the smartest companies are figuring out how to turn it up gradually, without losing the humans along the way.