What company would you trust to be your AI Jeeves?

Would you hand over all your private secrets to a start-up like OpenAI? Or would you prefer a long trusted brand name firm like Apple or Ford?

Now that I’m getting old and incompetent, I look forward to artificial intelligence systems that will take over my to-do lists and keep track of my life for me, the way Jeeves keeps Bertie Wooster from day-to-day disaster.

All I’d have to do is feed all my personal information into one system, then trust it to have my best interests at heart for the rest of my live.

But what company would I trust to hand over all my secrets to?

Wouldn’t other firms bid a lot to get my Jeeves AI to advise me to buy X rather than Y? And the chance for more nefarious finagling, such as outright embezzlement, goes up as well.

In the future, AI might become a pretty universal product, so firms offering AI services might compete less on developing their own cutting edge technology and more on trustworthiness of brand names. So, the future of Jeeves-like AI might well be less ambitious start-ups that first heard of 30 months ago and more giant firms with a generation or two or five (in the case of the Coca-Cola Corporation) of hard-earned brand equity that they’d be hesitant to sacrifice for a quick killing at your expense.

I looked up on Google who are the most trusted companies in America and was directed to this Forbes 2025 list:

Huh … I only recognize some of these companies.

NVIDIA makes the graphic processor unit chips used in AI, so its big clients are the big AI companies, which would seem to create possibilities for conflict of interest. So, much as they are an admirable firm, I’m crossing them off my particular list.

KKR is presumably Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts, the leveraged buyout buccaneers whose 1980s antics provided the title for the famous 1989 book about the war over RJ Nabisco, Barbarians at the Gate. Maybe they’ve changed their culture radically over the last 36 years, but KKR would not be the first firm I’d trust to not exploit my senile dependency upon them.

Parsons is an engineering firm focused on meeting the needs of the Deep State. Long headquartered in Pasadena, it moved to suburban Virginia to be closer to the Pentagon and other federal clients.

I’d trust #10 Lockheed’s engineers, but Lockheed executives? I recall as a child pestering my dad to play with me, but he couldn’t because he’d taken home all this F-104 stress engineering work to do.

Why did he have to slave away for years trying to keep the Mach 2 Starfighter from crashing? Well, he finally told me the full story when he was in his 90s.

After the paywall is a digression about Lockheed’s secret history, followed by my getting back on track and discussing more plausible candidates for trusted AI service providers, and finally whether you can trust anybody for long?