Unpacking 2025, Anticipating 2026

In 2025, the Trust and Safety (T&S) market evolved in response to increased enterprise adoption of advanced AI systems. With growing AI adoption, organizations continued investment in AI support services such as red teaming, hallucination checks, bias detection, and prompt engineering to mitigate new risks. These developments accelerated the growth of Responsible AI (RAI) practices, including readiness assessments, guardrail deployment, and fairness audits, enabling enterprises to embed transparency and oversight into their AI operations. The convergence of T&S and RAI is driving unified approaches to ethics, compliance, and risk governance. Delivery expanded in APAC and MEA to support compliance and multilingual demands, while North America and LATAM saw a decline in headcount.

The report also anticipates the major forces that will shape the T&S landscape in 2026 and beyond. These include continued scaling of agentic AI, which is transitioning from assistive to autonomous phase, automation targeting fraud detection, content provenance, and contextual moderation. RAI practices are evolving toward embedded pipelines, real-time monitoring, and measurable accountability through auditability and fairness intelligence. As delivery models and provider roles adjust, enterprises are increasingly emphasizing AI assurance, policy-driven operations, and talent with governance and oversight expertise. The report presents a forward-looking view into how enterprises and providers must adapt to address the accelerating risks and responsibilities of AI-driven environments.