S1 E20: Designing Systems People Will Actually Trust with Richard Savoie

Trust rarely breaks loudly. Most of the time, it erodes quietly, one small doubt at a time. A number that feels off. A recommendation that does not quite match reality. A system that is technically correct, but still ignored.

Richard Savoie has spent his career sitting right inside that tension.

He started in regulated medical devices, where mistakes can have dire consequences and trust is not optional. In that world, data has lineage, accountability is clear, and failure forces learning. Later, he moved into logistics and transportation, a very different environment, but one facing its own quiet crisis. Labor shortages. Rising complexity. Pressure to automate faster than people are ready to trust the systems doing the work.

In this first conversation, Richard shares that his focus on trust does not come only from engineering. It comes from experience. A long professional relationship ended when trust was broken in a way that forced him to rethink how people protect themselves, how they recover, and how they decide who or what deserves their confidence going forward.

Today, Richard builds digital twins of logistics networks that help fleets decide how to move, when to electrify, and where automation fits. These systems recommend actions to streamline our orders with UPS, FedEx, Amazon, and more. That is where trust becomes real: if the operators on the ground do not believe the data or the actions they're recommended, they stop listening. If they cannot explain a decision, they override it. So if accountability is unclear, adoption stalls.

This episode is about the human threshold where trust either forms or fails. We talk about early environments and how they shape responsibility. We talk about why people trust Google Maps without thinking, and why enterprise systems still struggle to earn that same confidence. And we explore what happens next as AI, EVs, and autonomous systems move from experiments into everyday infrastructure.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction:  Trust Breaks Quietly

03:30 – Childhood, Broken Homes, and Early Trust

10:45 – Moving to Australia and Building a Life

16:00 – When Trust Is Actively Broken

22:30 – Reliability, Systems, and the Light Bulb Cartel

26:30 – Medical Devices and Designing for Certainty

32:30 – Leaving Healthcare and Starting Adiona

37:00 – COVID and the Scaling Moment

43:30 – Why Operators Ignore “Correct” Systems

51:00 – AI, Probabilistic Systems, and the Limits of Certainty

57:30 – Energy Grids, Electrification, and Profit Optimization

1:00:00 – Autonomous Delivery and the Last Meter Problem

1:12:00 – Being Known Well