After exploring dozens of business opportunities and analysing the shifts happening today in technology, society, and local government, we arrived at a simple but powerful conclusion: TrustLab™ is the most important, viable, and future-proof business we could build right now.
Here’s how we got there:
1. AI will change the world — but slowly, unevenly, and with enormous disruption
AI is following the same pattern as the internet, smartphones, and social media — but likely with more than ten-times the impact over the next few decades.
At the same time, we believe:
- AI is over-hyped today relative to what it can genuinely do.
- Real, reliable AI capability will grow slowly and unpredictably.
- True AGI (human-level intelligence) is likely 10–30 years away, and even then it won’t replace real human experts because it lacks lived experience.
This creates a long window where AI is powerful, popular, widely adopted…
but not trustworthy.
2. The “AI slop era” is coming — and it will flood every sector
We expect a wave of:
- Low-quality AI-generated text
- AI-generated submissions
- Fake expertise
- Poorly-reviewed reports
- Mass-produced content disguised as human work
Solo operators, small vendors, community groups, activists, and eventually almost everyone will use AI at scale — and organisations, including Councils, will be overwhelmed with a flood of material they cannot reliably trust.
There are already clear signs this has begun.
‘AI slop’ has been named Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year for 2025 – ABC News
3. All AI output — text, images, video — will need human verification
For at least the next 10–30 years:
- Automated AI detectors will never be fully reliable
- AI-generated content will be impossible to judge by appearance alone
- Systems that caused the trust problem cannot be relied on to fix it
This leaves one source of trust – humans.
Human-in-the-loop verification becomes a premium service, not a commodity.
4. A deep niche beats a broad market, especially in the AI era
We’ve learned that the strongest business model suited to our small and focused team is:
- A narrow, underserved niche
- A clearly defined audience
- A problem that is getting worse every year
- A service where trust, rigour and expertise matter more than scale
Local Councils fit this perfectly. They regularly handle 100+ types of documents, rely heavily on procedural fairness, and face increasing pressure from community submissions, consultants, and regulation.
Councils need a solution, and nobody else is building one.
5. TrustLab™ is the natural solution to these converging trends
So we have built TrustLab™, a human-led verification service grounded in a formal, evidence-based methodology — the Human Verification Framework (HVF).
TrustLab™ will:
- Analyse documents submitted to Councils
- Verify human involvement
- Provide transparent, auditable evidence
- Offer a standard that Councils can rely on
- Fill the trust gap that AI has created
It’s manual, rigorous, human-centred work, precisely because trust cannot be automated.
6. Why we are uniquely positioned to build this
Two reasons:
- We understand Councils — how they work, where their risks are, and what they value.
- We understand AI’s limits, its hype cycle, and the gap between surface-level intelligence and genuine expertise.
TrustLab™ sits exactly where these two worlds collide.
In short:
AI is accelerating faster than public understanding, trust is declining, the world is flooding with unverified content, and Councils are exposed.
A human-verified truth layer is not just valuable — it’s necessary.
That’s why we built TrustLab™.