Pope Leo wants AI to answer to someone. Here's where investors are seeing the shift

Pope Leo XIV told a room of AI researchers this past month that the world has largely settled on the ethical principles AI should follow. What it lacks, he said, are institutions able to put them into practice.

The meeting, co-hosted by the Pontifical Academy, gave a pope who studied mathematics at Villanova a room full of the people building the technology. 

Pope Leo used it to argue against granting AI systems rights or legal personhood, warning that doing so would leave people harmed by them with no one to hold responsible. Decisions affecting human life, freedom and the use of force, he said, must remain under human oversight.

The timing gave the message weight. Pope Leo, 71, spoke 17 days after surgeons at Rome's Gemelli hospital removed the lower lobe of his right lung. He also spoke a month after President Trump and six frontier developers signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, a voluntary pledge Trump called morally binding but which carries no penalties for companies that fall short.

For investors, the significance lies less in any single rule than in where scrutiny and demand are heading. Pope Leo's position, set out at length in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, gives a moral vocabulary to questions customers, employees and regulators were already asking about who AI serves and who answers when it fails. A growing number of founders are building their businesses around the answers.

The capital at stake is substantial. Gartner forecasts worldwide AI spending will reach $2.59 trillion this year, a 47% increase from this past year. 

At the same time, investors have shown a growing appetite for returns tied to social outcomes: the Global Impact Investing Network estimated the impact investing market at roughly $1.76 trillion. Where those two pools of capital meet is where Pope Leo's message has the most commercial relevance.

Here's what this means for investors.

Founders are building around the common good, and increasingly finding markets for it

Pope Leo chose his papal name partly in tribute to Leo XIII, who wrote about the dignity of work during the first industrial revolution, and he has framed AI as the next one. That framing is showing up in how a new set of founders describe what they are building.

Crescite is one example, which was co-founded by CEO Eddie Cullen, who told EWTN News that he and Karl Kilb started the company "because we love the Church”. Its model makes a straightforward case that a financial product can be judged by who it serves as well as by what it earns.

SkyPSI is making a similar bet in a very different market. The Dallas-based company launched in August with $5 million of founder Vic Pellicano's own money, on the premise that robots can turn blue-collar workers into business owners. Yesterday SkyPSI took that model national, with its new Operator+ app, free to anyone with a Google account, mapping 17.1 million commercial buildings across the U.S. Said Pellicano "I grew up in a trailer park and lived out of my car. Nobody told me which direction to head to. Operator+ is the map.”

For investors weighing these models, the case for capital with a purpose has grown steadily. The Global Impact Investing Network estimates the impact investing market today is more than double its size four years earlier. That growth brings higher expectations, though: impact investors increasingly want measurable outcomes alongside returns. 

The conversation about companies that do good is also not new; the United Nations and others have championed it for years. However, it has gained new urgency in the age of AI. ElevenX Capital, the investment firm led by Anjli Jain, frames its mission this way: “At ElevenX, we invest in technology that elevates human capability, not replaces it. Because progress isn’t measured by automation – it’s measured by how much stronger, smarter, and healthier people become.”

Constanza Gomez Mont, CEO of C Minds, a Latin American think tank focused on systemic innovation and biodiversity that works with UNESCO on ethical AI, summed it up: “AI is a cross-cutting technology. There is no way it won’t touch every sector. That is why a critical perspective is needed—maintaining a public discourse that takes the risks into account.”

For investors, publicly traded companies to watch include Ecolab (ECL), the water, hygiene and cleaning solutions company.

Concerns about AI are increasingly backed by data

Pope Leo's insistence that automated decisions be open to examination and challenge lands at a moment when the industry's own researchers are documenting where today's tools fall short.

In September, Cloverleaf Labs, the research arm of AI coaching platform Cloverleaf, published AI as a Workplace Coach, which tested how five leading large language models respond to employees in conflict with a colleague or manager. Across 75 conversations, the models gave 638 distinct pieces of advice, and only three coached the employee toward genuinely repairing the relationship. In the two scenarios involving a difficult boss, 27 of 30 responses raised quitting as a legitimate option. The quality of the coaching also fell by roughly 40% when the employee held less power than the person they were describing.

Kirsten Moorefield, Head of Research at Cloverleaf Labs, described the pattern as a tendency for the models to tell users their idea is great the moment they signal a preference. “Even if it starts out introducing different ideas, the moment you indicate your preference, it tells you it’s a great idea. That’s not a thinking partner but a robotic affirmation,” said the executive.

The spending data suggests enterprises are taking that risk seriously. Gartner projects spending on AI governance platforms will reach $492 million in 2026 and surpass $1 billion by 2030, as AI regulation expands to cover 75% of the world's economies. 

It also found that organizations using dedicated governance platforms are more than 3 times more likely to achieve highly effective AI governance. For investors, that points to a growing category of software built around oversight, testing and accountability rather than raw model performance.

Publicly traded companies to watch include Alphabet (GOOG), one of the six signatories to the White House Accord, and Workday (WDAY), whose HR software is increasingly where enterprises decide how AI reaches employees in the first place.

Health is where AI that serves the individual is finding its clearest use

In his October address, Pope Leo argued that a reliable system serving the human person is worth more than an exceptionally powerful one. Healthcare is where that idea is easiest to test, and where a growing number of people are already turning to AI with questions they struggle to get answered elsewhere.

Ourself Health is building for one of the most underserved groups. Founder Adriana Torosian started the company after a sudden health crisis that her doctors couldn’t explain led her to track her own habits and hormonal cycles in search of the root cause, a personal system that later became the Ourself app. In April, the company introduced Stella, an AI health companion that connects hormones, symptoms and daily habits for women. The platform keeps personally identifying information separate from health data and never sells user data. That choice recently earned Ourself a place on an MSN list of ten health companies to watch for user privacy, as Apple, Google and Amazon push deeper into health.

In Latin America, the need looks different. Colombia-based 360 Health Data, founded in 2024, built Coralia Health to give Spanish-speaking physicians curated clinical research and real-world evidence in their own language. Founder Mike Hoey describes the problem in practical terms: clinicians lose hours searching multiple sources and trying to adapt findings produced in other parts of the world.

Independent practices face a similar squeeze. New York-based DearDoc gives 5,000 clinics an AI assistant that answers patient questions on their own websites and on online directories like WebMD, helping small practices compete with health systems that have far larger marketing budgets. White-label telehealth platform QuickBlox is helping to deliver secure video and chat consultation. Speaking to the Miami Herald, CEO Nate MacLeitch said AI can take over the work that is “really painfully administrative.”

These companies share the same commercial logic. As AI moves into health, trust, privacy and relevance to a specific patient or doctor are becoming the features users notice first.

Most discussion of AI in healthcare focuses on diagnosis, medical imaging and clinical assistants. Those are major advances, but behind every patient treated is a chain of logistics decisions that has to run with precision. That is the problem Adrián Figueroa, co-founder and CEO of Flexio and Routina, has built his business around. Routina applies AI to the coordination between medical product distributors and the organizations they supply, and it is about to face its first major test in the Caribbean. “In today’s AI world, the volume of outputs is more than a human can process. Reviewing everything makes the human the bottleneck, but human judgment is still necessary for high-risk or low-confidence decisions,” said Figueroa.

Publicly traded companies to watch include Teladoc Health (TDOC), a long-standing virtual care provider whose business depends on patients trusting remote and data-driven care.

The pope has few levers beyond persuasion, but he has used them consistently since naming AI a defining challenge in his first address to the cardinals in May of last year. On Friday he leaves for an 11-day trip to Latin America, where he spent decades as a missionary and bishop, and the questions he raised at the Vatican will travel with him.

For investors, the shift to watch is a practical one. As AI spending matures, the companies drawing attention are increasingly those that can show plainly who their technology serves, who stands behind it when it fails, and how it improves the lives of the people using it. 

That is a standard the Vatican is now articulating out loud, and one a growing number of leaders were already building toward.