Don’t Look at the Tree

Andreas Widmer

Nairobi, 2006. I am sitting in a conference room with a senior representative of one of the world’s largest aid organizations. I have come to talk with them about a Kenyan agricultural company that has built something I think is remarkable: a supply chain that moves fresh, ready-to-eat vegetables from small Kenyan farms to European supermarket shelves. Clean, efficient, scalable. This is a problem many have tried to solve in the past - but I haven’t seen anything close to this. It’s the kind of operation that makes you lean forward in your chair.

The entrepreneur himself is not with me. I am here on a “feeling out the field” kind of mission, but simply put, my aim for the meeting was clear to everyone: making my pitch to the aid organization. My entrepreneur needs an investment of $12 million, which would let the company expand production to meet demand that has already outgrown what it can deliver.

I think I have a slam-dunk. The numbers work, and the founder is exceptional, frankly one of the most capable entrepreneurs I have encountered anywhere. And like any good founder, he is not asking for charity. He is offering not just to “pay it back,” but a major return on investment.

The response stops me cold.

“If we invest and they succeed,” the representative says, “the founder will get rich. And that would not look good for us.”

I did not know how to respond. I just felt flabbergasted.

This aid organization deployed billions of dollars in the name of economic development for the poor. Its primary concern, it turned out, was not the good that could be done for these people. It was that one of them might succeed too visibly.

I have thought about that moment many times since then. I came to realize that what struck me was not the cynicism of it — it was the instinct of the answer. This was not a corrupt official protecting a racket. No, this was a well-meaning administrator in a well-funded organization whose entire mental framework had been built around a single goal: keep poverty from getting worse. The idea of trying to make prosperity possible, to integrate this founder into the networks where our own companies grow never even crossed their mind. The focus was to just “manage” poverty, provide relief, prevent things from getting worse, and make sure nothing looks bad.

He was trained to look at the problem, and that’s what he did. He was staring at the tree.

When I was taught how to drive in Switzerland, my instructor pointed something out to me that I have never forgotten. He explained that If you lose control of your car on ice and there is a sole tree ahead, most people still manage to hit that one tree. Why is that? He asked and explained: the thing is that you think you’re not in control of where the car goes any longer, but the truth is that you actually still have influence. Your hands follow your eyes, that ever-so-slight influence you have on the car makes a decisive difference… and it guides your car straight into the one, lone tree. The tree you fixate on is the tree you hit.

“Do not look at the tree — look where you want to go!” was his constant reminder during our lessons after that.

As I thought about my aid administrator’s answer to my pitch, I came to believe that this is the defining issue of the world’s struggle in alleviating poverty. We fail not because of malice, not indifference, it’s just … the wrong focal point. We’re focusing on the wrong thing.

Think about it: “Fighting poverty.” “Ending hunger.” “Closing the gap” … the entire vocabulary of development, aid, of government anti-poverty programs, of well-meaning philanthropy, is organized around the problem rather than the destination. And like a driver fixating on that tree, we have unintentionally steered straight into it, year after year, decade after decade, true prosperity for the poor eludes us.

What if we simply changed where we looked? Not fighting poverty, but actually creating prosperity.

Same road, same stakes, same people. But a completely different destination, and therefore a completely different set of tools, instincts, and measures of success. This isn’t about semantics. If we get the points, then everything changes, because when you look toward prosperity, we start focusing on how prosperity is created and then, the person in front of me stops being a problem to manage and becomes a creator to empower. And how you treat someone inevitably changes what they can become.

I want to tell you what I actually found when I looked toward prosperity in those markets.

I had spent a couple of decades in and around Boston and Silicon Valley — genuine hotbeds of entrepreneurial talent — and expected emerging markets to feel like earlier versions of that. Scrappier, less resourced, but recognizable.

I was wrong.

In Nairobi, Sao Paulo, Kabul, and elsewhere, during many years of leading a business strategy consulting firm focusing on frontier markets, I encountered entrepreneurs who humbled me. not because of their circumstances, but because of what they had built in spite of them. Their circumstances are mind boggling: No reliable power grid. No accessible capital and a currency that fluctuates uncontrollably. No predictable regulatory environment. No network of connections, and supply chains held together by improvisation and sheer will.

The grit I saw in those markets made Silicon Valley look comfortable by comparison. Because it was.

A founder in San Francisco who hits a wall can call an investor, reach out to former colleagues from their last startup, hire a consultant, pivot the model. An entrepreneur in Nairobi who hits a wall often has no safety net. They solve the problem or they lose everything. That pressure either breaks you or builds something extraordinary, and the people I met had been through that fire many times over.

They did not need to be saved. They were already business savvy. What they needed was what every entrepreneur needs: access to capital, access to markets, regulatory relief, and someone willing to bet on them.

What they were getting instead was a system designed, however unconsciously, to keep them dependent and separated.

In Africa, a generation of entrepreneurs has a name for themselves. They call themselves Cheetahs — fast, self-reliant, forward-looking. They have consciously rejected the poverty gaze. They do not define themselves by what they lack or what stands against them. They define themselves by where they want to go and what they want to build. They are not waiting for aid to arrive or governments to reform. They are pursuing prosperity on their own terms, against all odds, and they are doing it now.

Let me tell you about three of them that changed how I think.

Magatte Wade grew up in Senegal and built a successful company in the United States. Then she tried to do what every foreign entrepreneur dreams of - bring opportunity back home: manufacture in Africa, create jobs where they are needed most.

But before long, she ran into a wall that had nothing to do with talent or market demand. The issues at home in Senegal were different than what she dealt with in the US.

Boxes for shipping? In Senegal the minimum order was a thousand, and you had to pay half the money upfront and wait two months for delivery. In the US it would be one click, next day, delivered on credit. Every input she needed and every turn she took carried the same tax, the same delay, the same friction, and multiplied across every supply chain decision, it made Magatte’s costs gargantuan and her timelines a fantasy.

“They pile the rules higher every year,” she told me, “and then wonder why our products never make it to the world market.”

She explained to me that according to her experience, the obstacle was neither colonialism nor global capitalism. It was regulations written by African governments, applied to African businesses, that made it nearly impossible to compete — rules that protected the status quo, and the aid dependency that comes with it.

Magatte would not accept that. She kept pushing, kept looking at the destination rather than the obstacle. And that refusal — that insistence on pursuing prosperity rather than managing around poverty — is exactly what the aid framework cannot accommodate and does not know how to support.

Iqbal Quadir is, in my mind, the patron saint of prosperity-first thinking in emerging markets.

He grew up in rural Bangladesh without reliable access to the outside world. Years later, working as a Wall Street banker, his office network went down one morning, and productivity stopped instantly. It took him back to the farmers and shopkeepers of his childhood. People with no phone, no way to know if a three-hour walk to the market would be worth the trip, no way to call ahead and negotiate a price with the buyer.

He realized that in a modern economy, connectivity is productivity. Without a road you cannot bring goods to market. Without a phone you cannot even know if the market exists. So he decided to bring cell phones to those without access to the market.

Everyone told him that bringing mobile phones to Bangladesh’s poor was impossible. There were no towers in rural areas and the phones were too expensive - never mind the monthly fees.

He did it anyway. He partnered with Grameen Bank and Norway’s Telenor, trained local women as village phone operators, and let customers buy minutes as they could afford them. By 2016, Grameenphone had 56 million subscribers and was sending hundreds of millions in dividends back to Norway.

He did not create a poor person’s market. He literally brought the poor into the same networks as everyone else. He did not look at their poverty and ask how to relieve it. He looked at their potential and asked how to connect that to the market so they could create value for others.

That is the model. That is what prosperity-first thinking looks like in practice.

Matt Hangen asked that same question about something even more basic: water.

In many African towns, women and girls walk hours before sunrise to fetch it, spending approximately seventy thousand hours on this task over a lifetime. That’s years stolen from school, work, and enterprise.

Matt asked himself a simple question: What if water worked like electricity? piped to your neighborhood, reliable, and paid for only when it’s delivered?

He started a company, Water4, that started to drill wells, purify water with solar power, and pipe it into towns so no home was more than 200 meters from a tap. Families paid a small connection fee, and bought only what they needed for a few cents a day. Matt approached several local entrepreneurs to create companies that maintain the system, knowing full well that competition would increase service quality, because customers could walk away the moment quality failed.

That accountability, the simple pressure of a paying customer, kept the taps flowing in ways that donor-funded wells never did. In contrast, when an NGO digs a well and leaves, there is no one with skin in the game when it breaks. When NGO wells break, everyone’s waiting to see what happens. With Water4, someone pays for it, so they know who is responsible.

Within three years, half the homes in a Water4 community had taps. Hours once spent hauling water were freed for school, farming, and new enterprises made possible by water that was finally reliable and close.

Even an issue as basic as water supply, something we instinctively categorize as beyond the reach of markets, is fixed sustainably if we look for prosperity solutions rather than handouts.

Three people. Three sectors. One common truth.

None of these friends of mine succeeded because the system helped them. Magatte, Iqbal and Matt succeeded because they were stubborn enough to push through it. And none of them received meaningful support from aid organizations.

Now the data.

Africa houses about 19% of the world population, but receives roughly 30 percent of the world’s development aid. It attracts less than 6 percent of global foreign direct investment. Read those three numbers together and you begin to understand the problem.

But before crunching the numbers, let’s first agree on what poverty actually is, because I don’t think we’ve been defining it correctly.

In my view, poverty is not primarily a lack of money. Money is more of a symptom than a problem. Poverty is that state of being excluded from, or outside of the networks where value is created, exchanged, and grown; from the supply chains, the capital markets, the customer relationships, the trade routes where prosperity actually happens. When you are outside those networks, no amount of aid changes your fundamental position. You remain a recipient, not a participant.

If poverty is exclusion, then the key question is no longer “how much are we giving?” but rather “are we actually bringing people in?”

When I look at Asia — South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam. They received little to no sustained aid. I see that instead of aid, they received foreign direct investment, trade relationships, and the pressure and opportunity of open markets. And go see for yourself, the results are not subtle. These are some of the fastest economic transformations in human history.

The difference is not culture, not geography, not the quality of the people. It is the view.

Aid says: Poverty is a problem and we are here to fix it. Here is what you need, as we define it, managed by us, on our terms. Do what we say and you’ll be fine.

Investment says: we believe in what you are building, let’s partner up. Let’s help- and keep each other accountable and then let’s share the prosperity we create together.

One keeps you outside the network as an inferior recipient. The other brings you in as an equal partner.

One issue was still on my mind: what about the great suffering I saw in some of the places I’ve traveled? What about the acute human suffering that screams for immediate help?

To step in and help directly in these cases - I would call them the “Good Samaritan situations” - are really a non-negotiable human instinct. So I am of course not suggesting we stop that.

But we should be more nuanced about the situations we encounter in emerging markets. I believe that a humanitarian crisis is a completely different issue from economic development. Aid is the right instrument for a humanitarian crisis — a flood, a famine, a war. But the tell-tale sign of a crisis is that it is time-bound, and aid is designed for exactly that: to relieve acute suffering until people can stand on their own again.

Economic development is a completely different issue. Poverty is not a crisis. It is a condition, a structural exclusion from the networks of productivity and exchange. It’s, in the true sense, a “way of life” … in that it doesn’t change, it’s an indefinite status quo. And I learned that when you apply a crisis instrument to alleviate a structural condition, you do not solve it — you institutionalize it. You build an entire industry around it whose survival depends, however unconsciously, on the problem never being solved. You don’t help, you hurt.

That is what I saw in Nairobi. Not corruption, not bad faith, just an industry that had lost sight of the different problems and was staring, year after year, at the tree.

Africa has been offered the wrong instrument for fifty years, and every year it’s doubled down: more aid, more programs, more organizations whose institutional survival depends on the problem never being solved. In the military, we used to call such situations a self-licking ice cream cone. It exists for its own sake indefinitely.

Meanwhile, the entrepreneurs I met in Nairobi are still there. Still gritty. Still building with whatever they can find. Still waiting for someone to bet on them.

So, let me tell you what I am asking of you if you want to help anyone who’s poor.

It’s not for your charity. Not for your pity. Not for a donation to another well-meaning organization managing poverty from a distance.

I am asking you to do what you already know how to do.

Africa is my most dramatic example — fifty years of the wrong instrument, applied to some of the most talented entrepreneurs on earth, with entirely predictable results. But the principle is not African. It is universal.

Look at your own city, your own region. The neighborhood twenty minutes from your office that has not seen real private investment in decades. The rural community hollowed out by the exit of its last employer. The inner-city entrepreneur who cannot get a meeting with a banker, insurance broker or supplier.

Same problem. Same solution.

Consider Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, New York — a real business, supplying real customers including Ben & Jerry’s and Whole Foods, built on a single radical premise: if you want to work, you get a chance. No resume, no background check, no interview. Just an open door and a real job with real expectations and real dignity. Greyston did not fix people first and then employ them. It employed them and trusted the work to do what charity never could.

That is prosperity thinking in Yonkers as much as in Nairobi. You’d think the geography matters, but I found that on this issue it doesn’t. The instrument is the same. The principle is the same. The result is the same.

So… Go find an existing business in an underserved market that is solving a real problem for real customers. Invest in it. Source from it. Partner with it. Build a supply chain through it. Do business with it.

Because the most powerful poverty intervention ever invented is a customer — not a donor, not an aid program, not a government initiative with a five-year sunset clause.

A customer.

When someone pays for a product or service, they do not just transfer money. They transfer dignity. They say: what you built has value, you have something I want, we are in this as equals.

That transaction, multiplied across millions of free exchanges, is how every prosperous society in history was built — not through aid, not through government programs, but through enterprise.

Poverty is the state of being outside the networks where value is created. The answer to exclusion is not a check. It is an invitation — into your supply chain, your customer base, your investment portfolio, your trade partnerships, your market.

And here is what I have come to believe most deeply, from every market I have worked in and every entrepreneur I have sat across from: when you treat someone as prosperous, when you extend to them the dignity of a real business relationship rather than the condescension of a handout, something shifts. Not just in their circumstances, but in them. In how they see themselves and what they believe is possible.

Envision people as prosperous. Treat them accordingly. Watch what happens.

Don’t manage poverty. Help create prosperity.

Stop looking at the tree. Look at the road to prosperity!

Andreas Widmer teaches enterprise solutions to poverty at The Catholic University of America and was a featured voice in the documentary Poverty Inc. He writes about business, human dignity, and the conditions for lasting prosperity.

As I prepared this reflection, I expected that the primary source of inspiration would come from my decades of experience in the tech industry... but that was not the case. The inspiration came instead from what I learned at my very first job.

When I was in my twenties, I had the privilege of serving as a Swiss Guard for Pope John Paul II. Watching the way he led shaped my entire life. He had this simple way of talking about work that turned the whole thing upside down for me. He’d say, “No one works for me, you work with me.”[1]

Just that little change revealed something deeper that I never thought about. It showed the dignity he saw in every person, no matter their role, whether they were carrying a crozier, ensuring his security, or sweeping the floors. That dignity is at the heart of what John Paul called the Gospel of Work.[2]

The Gospel of Work says that our daily labor is not just about producing things or hitting numbers on a spreadsheet. It’s one of the ways God sanctifies us and draws us into His own creative mission. Because when we work, we do not only make more, but we also ought to become more.[3]

In Genesis 2:15, we read that “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it.”[4] That wasn’t just about survival. This was God’s invitation to stewardship - the stewardship of creation, yes, but also the stewardship of our own souls.

Now, in a modern context - and perhaps even more urgently in an age shaped by AI - we run into two very mistaken paradigms about work.

The first says, roughly: Greed is good. Few would put it as crassly as that, but this is the underlying assumption: It’s only business. As long as it’s profitable, it’s fine. Morality gets suspended through the primacy of financial profit. Business is seen as amoral - beyond morality.

The second paradigm says: Greed may not be good, but it’s a part of business. Therefore, go do what you need to do to succeed in business, but then, afterwards you have to give back as a form of atonement. This idea assumes that business is inherently bad; a necessary evil for which you have to be redeemed afterward by some form of charity. Here again, virtue is outside the job - bolted on artificially.

Both of these paradigms get something terribly wrong. They focus only on the output of work, how much you make either in productivity or in financial return... and miss the truth that John Paul II insists on: that the purpose of work itself isn’t only to make more, but to become more.

When I ran a business consulting firm - a completely secular, for-profit company - we were offered a very lucrative contract to design a go-to-market strategy for alcohol shots - you know, those little bottles sold at stores. It was a great assignment with plenty of profit for the team that evaluated it. But the leader of that business unit recommended we turn it down.

He explained that he was worried about what this product would do to people fighting addiction. He felt it was way too tempting a product for the wrong kind of customer. He suggested that he would do the project if it was for a high-end Rum... but for cheap shots... he just couldn’t do it. I was impressed and as a result we followed his recommendation. He didn’t treat profit as supreme. He treated people as supreme. That’s the Gospel of Work lived out.[2]

In AI, the equivalent of this might be the kind of prompts we allow to be executed, or what decisions we are willing to abdicate to the software.

The Gospel of Work proclaims that work is not just a “thing” we do to make money, but that it is a kind of vocation. It’s a calling to holiness through which we literally co-create with God.[2]

Work has two purposes. One, to make more; to produce goods and services that genuinely serve the common good. And two, to become more; to help anyone involved grow in skill, virtue and ultimately in holiness.

From what I’ve learned about Catholic anthropology and the church’s view of the human person, I clearly understand that business isn’t considered evil by nature. Rather, business is seen as a channel for God’s grace to flood into the world.[8]

I think God’s blueprint for good work can be summed up using three words: Create, Support, Reward. These are the three objectives of work.

THE FIRST OBJECTIVE: CREATE

Whatever we create, whether it is a product, a service, or an AI system, it has to be truly good. Its purpose must be to truly serve. And not just the customer. The crucial test for every AI decision is to ask: does this help us make and become more?

That’s our ultimate moral responsibility as the ones who have created it. How do we know it’s good? By discerning that in our conscience. And by consulting with others in a wide variety of roles: people working on the project, those who invest in it, those who buy it, and those who are affected by what we do.

I know of a founder of an AI system who programmed it to explicitly respect the dignity of the human person in all its answers, because he believes that we are all created in the Imago Dei.[6]

When you’re in business, you face three fundamental questions about what you’re making:

Is what we are making truly good? This isn’t rhetorical. It means: Can we articulate why this product or service genuinely serves people? Can we explore the scenarios where it could cause harm, and do we have a plan to prevent that? Are we hoping for good outcomes, or are we actively designing for them?

How specifically does what we do/create serve human flourishing?

What incentives are we creating? Because incentives shape behavior. If we reward only speed or revenue, we’ll get speed and revenue—and corners cut. What does it look like if every person on our team, from engineering to sales, is pulling toward the same good outcome we say we want?

Does it respect God’s order? I mean this seriously: Does our work help or exploit the people involved—investors, suppliers, employees, managers, distributors? How do we measure whether we’re building people up in their excellence, or using them? And if we find we’re exploiting, what’s our corrective action?

It is incumbent on me as the CEO to make these questions discussable in my company. We have an obligation to form upright consciences so that we can define acceptable answers to them. Our solutions ought to create a both/and: a moral and profitable company. If we only do one or the other - we fall short of God’s vision of work. To me, this is non-negotiable: We have to make AND become more!

Finding this balance is not easy. It’s one of the most difficult things we do. So it’s tempting to either go all in on profit and cut moral corners, or to lean not-for-profit and settle for mediocrity. I see this usually in one of two ways: either by excusing poor results with “I can’t be expected to succeed, hampered as I am by moral strictures”, or by turning to non-profit work as an easy out of competition. I am not disparaging work that springs from a mission.

But I have frequently seen it as a real temptation to turn to non-profit work as a way of refusing the hard work of transforming the world of business with the Gospel.

If we’re called to business, we must be like Joshua and Caleb— two of the twelve scouts Moses sent to survey the Promised Land, who came back not with fear but with faith, trusting that God would give them the victory — and not like the other ten scouts, who saw the hardships and wanted to turn back. Only Joshua and Caleb entered the land.[5]

With AI now being a part of the conversation, it invites us - no, it demands us to make moral questions more discussable. We need to integrate moral discernment into the decision making process around design, data, deployment, and use. We need to ensure that not only the first wave of creators and users flourish through use, but that we also consider the long term consequences of these products.

THE SECOND OBJECTIVE: SUPPORT

John Paul’s line was: “You work with me, not for me.” [1] Our common aim is to pursue the creation of a good, and through that pursuit, to personally flourish and grow in holiness. This is in my view the Catholic vision of work: person-centered work.[8] It’s crucial in AI to keep this in mind because it’s possible to automate so much that we forget that there’s a human person at the center of work and the economy.

Like many other technological innovations, AI has the potential to take away much of the drudgery and many repetitive tasks, and free people for work that engages their minds and hearts; work essential for the virtue and holiness of the person. It’s the “Become more” part of the equation.

Think about Excel. It democratized analysis. Think about speech recognition - it opened doors for the disabled to participate more fully. Those are technologies in service to people.

In your own work, think of one task that drains all meaning. We’re all experiencing the dread of combing through a sea of numbers or raw data to create a first version of a report. To find trends and notice outliers. Could AI free us from that so our customers could focus more on creating, leading, or serving? Is there a way to create AI products that increase the integration of those currently excluded? To further the access to work, to enable social mobility. To help our customers live the American Dream?

That’s a question worth asking. But AI can of course do the opposite as well - in essence it could be created in a way that diminishes human flourishing - and it will be our approach, our decision process that determines our solutions. I think it’s critical that we take the opportunity early on - like now - to introduce accountability in the industry.

There is no difference between this and the introduction of any other new technology. We have two options: take responsibility for this ourselves as an industry, and as individual practitioners, or let our governments regulate it.

I believe in self-governance. Transparent, principled and virtuous, with an independent checks and balances process that distributes power and accountability.

Before green-lighting an AI project, you might ask:

What’s the ultimate aim here - does this help the team and our society grow in excellence and holiness? How do we quantify that?

How is profitability realized in our company? How can we show it transparently to our employees so they understand our business model and how their work affects our value creation?

Does it take drudgery out of work and make it more meaningful? Can we have the products measure that, so it’s not just a marketing gimmick?

Is it truly good?... Let’s talk about what truly good is, how we define it as a team, and ask how our customers, investors and communities define it.

Will contributors be rewarded justly?... not just the folks directly involved - but what about the data-providers, even the involuntary ones?

THE THIRD OBJECTIVE: REWARD

We ought to reward everyone who contributed to the value creation.

Luke 10:7 says, “The laborer is worthy of his wages.”[7] The economy exists for man, not man for the economy. We have a right to make more!

Reward is about recognizing the value that people create as well as sharing it justly amongst all contributors. It’s key to remember here that money is not a fixed sum in the world. Money is the new value we create anytime we create value for a customer, commonly referred to as profit. This creation of new value is in my view both spiritual and material - we can create more out of less through our work. It reflects our incarnate spiritual nature - our ability to imitate God in the physical realm. The result is new value - with money being the transfer value of choice - we ought to adequately share that material return with everyone who contributed to the creation of it.

In AI, that means structuring pay, opportunities, and even schedules so that productivity gains are shared with all contributors, not just hoarded at the top.

I know of companies that transparently and proportionally share their productivity gains or profits with each of the contributors of the value being created. Others could share the efficiency created by the use of AI with the employees - some of the created efficiency goes to them as pay or vacation, some of it goes to the company’s bottom line.

It’s also about transparency with our data. Where does the corpus come from, who contributed to it - even unknowingly? These are questions the industry has not yet answered well, and they deserve their own serious treatment. For now, I simply want to name them: our responsibility includes showing people the value they create and how it’s measured, before society catches up and imposes its own answers.

PERSONAL FORMATION FOR AI LEADERS

None of this works without a well-formed conscience. If you’re going to lead in AI - and as Catholics, we absolutely must - you need to deeply study our faith in general and Catholic Social Teaching in particular (but not just the slogans of Catholic Social Teaching watered down to suit our own politics and policy preferences. The world is crying out for people who live these principles in their depths.) John Paul said CST is addressed not just to Catholics but to “all people of goodwill.”[8] So this isn’t something you can’t share with your team. It’s not “proselitizing”... this is a gift of our Church to humanity: human-centered guidelines of how we best live together for everyone to flourish. Based on two thousand years of experience!

But as a Catholic business leader, that also means cultivating a prayer life. Making frequent use of the sacraments. Seeking spiritual direction. And training your teams in virtue ethics right alongside the technical skills.

Because in AI, the most dangerous gap isn’t technical, it’s moral.

A PRACTICAL EXERCISE

As a practical exercise, consider drawing three columns: Create, Support, Reward. In each one, write a concrete commitment your team can make so that your AI project not only makes more but helps people become more. Maybe it’s designing features to protect vulnerable users. Maybe it’s freeing your staff from draining and repetitive work. Maybe it’s sharing profits when AI boosts productivity.

Become more!

I want to close where we began - with John Paul’s words:

“When we work right, we not only make more, but we become more.”[3]

Let every AI decision meet that test. May it make more, serving the common good. May it help people become more, in virtue, skill, and human flourishing.

As we read in Genesis: In God’s plan, AI should help us till and keep the garden with greater care, not strip it of meaning.[4]

So each time you design a line of code, choose a dataset, or deploy a model, ask yourself: Is this truly good? And is it making us become more?

If we can answer yes, consistently, truthfully - then this remarkable technology becomes part of God’s creative mission. And we will have lived the Gospel of Work in the age of AI.[2]

FOOTNOTES

[1] Pope John Paul II. Personal communication, recalled by Andreas Widmer. Vatican City, circa 1986-1989.

[2] Widmer, Andreas. The Gospel of Work (8-part video series). Ciocca Center. Available at www.cioccacenter.com. The theological foundation of this concept is drawn from Pope John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (On Human Work). Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1981.

[3] Pope John Paul II. Personal communication, recalled by Andreas Widmer. Vatican City, circa 1986-1989.

[4] The New American Bible, Revised Edition. Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011. Genesis 2:15; Numbers 13-14; Luke 10:7.

[5] Ibid. Numbers 13-14.

[6] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997. Paragraphs 355-357, 1700.

[7] The New American Bible, Revised Edition. Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011. Luke 10:7.

[8] Pope John XXIII. Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth). Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1963. The broader framework of Catholic Social Teaching referenced throughout this essay draws heavily from: Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004.