Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger expands role at Gloo in push to shape technology for good
With a plan to shape technology, particularly Artificial Intelligence, toward positive endeavors, Gloo, a leading technology platform connecting the faith ecosystem, announced Monday that Pat Gelsinger, the former CEO of multinational technology company Intel, has expanded his role at the firm from investor and chairman to executive chairman and head of technology.
“We're super excited to be able to announce that Pat Gelsinger is increasing his involvement with Gloo. Pat has been involved with Gloo for about a decade as an investor and a board member and has been involved for the last five years as our chairman,” Gloo co-founder Scott Beck told The Christian Post in an interview.
“We're very enthusiastic to be able to say that he's increasing that involvement, and he's becoming executive chairman and head of technology where he'll be involved much more deeply in the operations and in building the capabilities to be able to make sure that we're shaping technology for good to be able to serve this big faith ecosystem.”
Get Our Latest News for FREE
The faith ecosystem in the U.S. alone spans approximately 450,000 churches, faith networks and nonprofits, but has been slow to adopt digital technology.
Gloo, which is headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, serves more than 100,000 churches and organizations along with some 1,000 resource partners by connecting ministry leaders and nonprofits to values-based AI, insights, funding, and other resources.
Gelsinger aims to catalyze the company’s efforts by combining two personal passions.
“The idea of my life, the thesis of what I’ve done throughout my career, has been faith and technology,” Gelsinger told CP.
“Being able to have an organization like Gloo that is truly unifying my two lifelong ambitions is extraordinary. […] Gloo is at this point of inflection where the platform is taking off. It's growing rapidly. And maybe most importantly, the idea of AI and how AI is in this transformative nascency, I believe the values of the faith flourishing ecosystem needs to show up” and help shape the technology as a force for good, he explained.
Gelsinger pointed to the slow reaction of the faith community to get involved with consumer social internet platforms which “has not been a positive for society.” And he doesn’t want to repeat that mistake with rapidly advancing AI.
“In this case, this is where we are going, the ability to shape AI as a force for good is enormous. Being able to truly be where faith and technology come together, be an influence for how the church can take advantage of the latest technology but do so in shaping AI as a force for good,” he said. “I’m quite excited about the opportunity, and expanding my role with Gloo is a great way to deliver on that.”
Beck agrees with Gelsinger that there is a growing desire in the faith community to harness the power of technology and that Gloo is positioned to help them do that.
“We're seeing a very significant movement in the faith ecosystem, the Christian ecosystem, in terms of interest in and the adoption of [the technology],” said Beck.
“We're already working with over 250 publishers to bring their content together in a highly compliant manner to be able to enhance that with AI, put it into a digital rights management system so that they control who they then work with as it relates to that content,” he explained. “In doing that, you can now start to build content layer that allows AI to be able to become more trusted and to be able to provide answers consistent with the content from those publishers and the biblical principles that this ecosystem holds dear.”
In addition to overseeing Gloo AI to advanced values-aligned AI, Gelsinger will also be spearheading Gloo’s plan to build the world’s first vertical industry cloud for faith and flourishing.
“When you think of AI, you hear things like large language models, but what is that?
Well, it’s a trained environment that people bring specific data in, and we’re going to be training our models, and we’ll be presenting models to the community, services to the community that they can build their applications on,” Gelsinger explained.
“We’re going to be open, trusted and transparent about how those models were built, how we're testing them on an ongoing basis and getting the feedback from this community to make sure that we're meeting their needs so they can deploy AI in their environment,” he added.
Gelsinger believes that the use of AI in the faith and flourishing community will be transformative in areas like Bible and sermon translation, contextualization, and even on social networks. And in the next two decades, he believes AI will become “essential to every aspect of human life.”
“Imagine we were here 25 years ago, and we were just starting to get underway with the internet. I remember the first time I went to the internet; it was like a holy moment. […] Everything changed as a result. Now, if you don't let your teenager on the internet for 10 seconds, you ruin their entire life,” he said.
“That’s what will happen with AI over the course of the next two decades. It will become that important, that integrated, that essential to every aspect of human life.”
While they admit that the faith ecosystem can be challenging to serve because it's “highly fragmented and complex” due to denominational views and other factors, both Gelsinger and Scott say Gloo has done the necessary work over the last decade to function as a unifying force for the community.
“We believe that relationship catalyzes growth. We believe that God created us for relationship with Him and with one another, and technology and content needs to come in service of those relational interactions, not to disintermediate the relational interactions,” Beck said.
“It [our work] is about enabling unity, not because we want uniformity. That's not the case at all. We connect, and we enable unity so that they can gain the benefit of the collective strength of the system,” he said of Gloo’s connective power in the faith ecosystem.
“You can't gain the benefit of the collective strength of the system unless you're connected. That's why we're so focused on creating the connectivity in a trusted and a secure manner so that we can ultimately release the system's collective strength.”
For members of the faith community who might be concerned about the integration of AI and other technologies into their faith and practice, both Gelsinger and Beck pointed to the neutrality of technology while acknowledging risks that will need to be managed.
“I’ve said this for decades: technology is neutral. It’s neither good nor bad. It’s how we shape it, it’s how we use it, it’s how we bring it forward. And part of our objective is to be shaping technology as a force for good,” Gelsinger added.
“I think that the demonstration of AI, some of the examples are just extraordinary. [...] But they also come with risks. And those are risks that need to be managed, they need to be ultimately discussed, and that's where Gloo is gonna be firmly sitting,” he said. “We’ll have a Trust Council that we’ll be establishing as well that helps us navigate those questions. We do believe that the progress of technology is undeniable. How we embrace it, shape it, and make it beneficial for the flourishing of every human on the planet. That's why I'm participating in this journey.”
And Beck wants members of the faith community who are still on the sidelines to just “lean in.”
“Our message to the ecosystem is to lean in. We have, we believe, an imperative to be able to shape and use technology for good. And the only way that that's gonna be done is if the broader faith community, the churches, the denominations, the publishers, the application providers are leaning in,” he said. “The way that they would do that from our standpoint is to get involved in Gloo, and you're gonna do that at gloo.us.”
Contact: leonardo.blair@christianpost.com Follow Leonardo Blair on Twitter: @leoblair Follow Leonardo Blair on Facebook: LeoBlairChristianPost
