By Manoj Saxena, CEO and Founder, Trustwise
Last year, enterprise buyers spent $4.6 billion on generative AI applications, an almost 8x increase from the previous year. Most didn’t buy productivity engines; they bought risk engines: 78% of CISOs now report AI-powered threats are significantly impacting their organizations, while 91% saw security incidents increase over the past year. And the power bill is soaring as generative AI workloads consume 10–30x more energy than task-specific AI, inflating both costs and carbon emissions.
The conventional wisdom says you can have efficiency, safety, or security…pick two.
Trustwise challenges this assumption. AI Trust delivers all three: reducing resource impact, enforcing safety to prevent internal missteps and disasters, and hardening security to block external threats, all in real time, at enterprise scale.
That’s what NatWest Group, a British banking and financial services company, demonstrated in their AI operations using the Trustwise Harmony AI Control Tower. In a Proof-of-Concept with the Harmony AI Control Tower, we demonstrated potential to achieve a reduction in AI operational costs and latency and measurable carbon emission reductions aligned with Green Software Foundation’s SCI ISO21031:2024 standards, all while meeting stringent financial services security and compliance requirements.
Beyond AI Firewalls: How NatWest Embedded AI Trust Into Every Decision
When NatWest came to us, they had clear objectives around AIDEN, their internal AI platform used daily by thousands of employees across a sophisticated infrastructure running multiple models from GPT-4o to Llama variants. They needed to meet aggressive sustainability targets while upholding the stringent security and compliance standards expected of a global bank.
Traditional security tools, built for perimeter defense, struggle to evaluate or constrain AI decision-making at runtime. AI observability and model evaluation tools can detect patterns and outputs, but they can’t control what an AI decides or does in real time. NatWest needed runtime AI behavior enforcement.
As Dr. Paul Dongha, NatWest Group’s head of responsible AI and AI strategy, put it: “The financial services industry cannot afford AI systems that operate as black boxes. We need provable compliance, measurable performance, and auditable decision-making at every step.”
Instead of just monitoring AI behavior after the fact, Trustwise is aiming to embed “trust as code” directly into NatWest’s AI operations, optimizing for cost and carbon efficiency while enforcing a comprehensive AI security and safety posture in real time.
Our Harmony AI Control Tower acts as a unified backplane that optimizes every interaction before it happens, enforces policies in real time, and generates the audit trails that regulators demand.
Engineering Trust as Code into High-Stakes AI Systems
NatWest’s proof-of-concept results offer a blueprint for any organization operating in a high-stakes environment where mistakes have real consequences.
With Harmony AI, NatWest was able to optimize for cost and carbon efficiency while enforcing robust security and safety controls in real time, the foundation of what we call AI Trust. AI Security stops external attacks. AI Safety and efficiency stop internal missteps and disasters. Together, they make AI reliable, compliant, and operationally sustainable.
For healthcare organizations, this approach could enable AI systems that automatically comply with HIPAA, optimize for cost and carbon efficiency, and enforce comprehensive security and safety controls in real time while significantly reducing operational costs.
For manufacturing companies, this could mean AI systems that maximize productivity, maintain cost and carbon efficiency, and enforce real-time security and safety controls without requiring constant human oversight.
This isn’t “watch and react” observability. It’s runtime AI control that prevents AI failures before they happen, not just report on them afterward.
Leading organizations don’t rely on hope. They embed security, safety, and efficiency into every decision from the start, creating AI that can be trusted to act, not just to answer. That’s the foundation of AI Trust.
The Agentic Future is Here… and it Demands Runtime AI Control and Governance
We’re moving from AI that just generates answers to AI that takes actions. Autonomous agents use tools, make plans, execute tasks, and interact with other systems. They are also vulnerable to external attacks like prompt injections and toolchain exploits and to internal failures like sensitive data leakage, policy violations, and runaway costs.
Together, these risks require a new approach: AI Trust, where security, safety, and efficiency are enforced in real time.
You can’t firewall every decision. You can’t manually audit thousands of actions in flight and hope to catch compliance violations or cost overruns after the fact. You can secure and optimize them at runtime, enabling organizations to scale AI with greater confidence.
NatWest’s Harmony AI Control Tower proof-of-concept demonstrated that enterprises no longer must choose between innovation and responsibility. With the right approach, organizations can achieve operational excellence, environmental leadership, and provable compliance simultaneously.
The question isn’t whether AI will be part of your business; it’s whether you’ll build trust into every AI decision before agentic systems arrive at scale.
Ready to explore scaling AI with confidence? Learn more about Trustwise Harmony AI, the Trust Layer for agentic AI, and why leading financial and healthcare institutions are evaluating our platform.
