As the CEO of a tech company, I’m used to seeing leaders in my industry dismiss the moral warnings about AI as hand-wringing coming from the naive, Luddites, or anti-capitalists. When Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, the reaction from tech circles was what I expected: a tepid acknowledgement, followed by an obligatory affirmation of ethical deployment of AI and then back to building. This is a major mistake and a missed opportunity.
I run a publicly traded AI company. I’m also Catholic. But you don’t have to share my faith to recognize that this encyclical is doing something unusual and important.
AI Is Moving Faster Than Any Previous Revolution
In 1891, Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum, the Church’s first major statement on the social effects of the Industrial Revolution. He wrote it 122 years after the steam engine entered common use. By then, the harm was already on the ground: child labor, urban slums, a working class without protection. The encyclical was a reckoning, not a warning.
Pope Leo XIV, who chose his papal name in homage to Leo XIII, has done the opposite. He is addressing AI now, while we are still early enough to shape it.
That timing is the most important thing about the document. AI is being adopted faster than any general-purpose technology in history. The window to influence how it gets deployed will close quickly. Whether you read the Pope’s warnings as theology or as policy, the underlying claim is the same: the choices being made by a handful of companies right now will determine whether the next decade looks more like broad-based productivity gains or creates an ever-widening sinkhole of global poverty.
Opportunity and Disruption Will Arrive Together
The Industrial Revolution did both at once. It democratized goods that had previously been the exclusive privilege of the wealthy: mass-produced clothing, shoes, furniture, and eventually food. The biggest beneficiaries, historically, were not the rich (they already had hand-stitched boots) but the poor.
At the same time, it displaced an enormous share of the workforce. The United States went from 90% of people working on farms to roughly 1%. That transition created an entirely new category of urban poor in the U.S.
AI is on the same arc. The kind of help that used to require money, time, connections, or all of them is collapsing into a chat window. Tasks that once required access to lawyers, tutors, researchers, translators, or consultants can increasingly be performed at little or no cost. For millions of people, that represents a genuine expansion of opportunity and access.
But the displacement will be real too, and pretending otherwise is the same posture that left the 19th-century working class to fend for itself. Entire categories of work will change. Some jobs will disappear, many will be transformed, and new ones will emerge.
Technology Is Neutral. Product Design Isn’t.
This is where I think Pope Leo’s framing matters for executives, not just for the faithful. The technology itself is neutral. Good or bad outcomes are a function of how we choose to deploy it. That sounds obvious. It is not how the industry behaves.
Retail leveraged trading platforms cause documented harm: between 74% and 89% of customers lose money, often funds they cannot afford to lose. The platform’s revenue is, by direct accounting, the customer’s loss. Instead, AI should be used to invert that. In an ideal scenario, users place paper trades, and the system aggregates the predictive signal across the user base. When it identifies a strong one, the company trades with its own balance sheet and shares half the gain with the users whose judgment contributed. The user cannot lose money on a trade they did not fund. The company only profits when users are right.
There is also an AI system trained on the writings of Pope Benedict XVI, in partnership with the Benedict XVI Society, to make a dense theological corpus accessible to readers who would otherwise never engage with it. Same underlying logic: use the technology to widen access, not to extract.
Neither product is a cure for the broader risks Pope Leo is naming. They are two attempts to demonstrate that you can build a profitable AI company without designing the harm into it.
This is a new concept for many tech companies. The one-off blog post about using AI to benefit humanity or writing a guilt-induced check to an NGO retraining laid-off employees won’t work this time. There is no equivalent of carbon emission offset credits to buy your way out, just to feel better.
You either design the harm out of the product, or you don’t. That is the question this encyclical is putting to my industry and it’s one every tech CEO needs to answer.
