AI Can Connect the World—or Divide It. Leaders Must Decide.
Pope Leo’s warning about artificial intelligence raises a leadership question every executive must answer.
By Rich “Trigger” Bontrager — America’s Leadership Broadcaster™
We keep asking what artificial intelligence can do. Perhaps leaders need to start asking a different question:
What is artificial intelligence doing to us?
Is it helping us understand one another—or creating greater distance? Is it strengthening trust—or making truth more difficult to recognize? Is it helping leaders communicate more personally—or giving them another way to avoid personal communication?
And as AI becomes more deeply embedded in our companies, institutions, media, and everyday lives, is it bringing people together—or quietly pushing them farther apart?
Those questions moved to the international stage when Pope Leo XIV delivered a message to the AI4Peace International Symposium in Rome. He called for artificial intelligence to be developed and used in ways that promote peace, protect human dignity, and strengthen human relationships rather than deepen division.
That is more than a technology warning.
It is a leadership challenge.
Technology Is Not Morally Neutral
Artificial intelligence is often presented as a tool. But tools do not emerge in a vacuum.
Human beings decide what they are designed to do. Leaders determine how they will be deployed. Organizations establish the values, incentives, boundaries, and priorities surrounding their use.
The Vatican’s AI4Peace initiative makes this point directly: AI systems are not ethically neutral. They contain human design choices, training data, and optimization goals that can produce profound consequences.
Pope Leo’s message calls leaders to consider those consequences before becoming overwhelmed by what the technology can accomplish. AI can help translate languages, broaden access to information, accelerate medical discoveries, analyze complex data, and connect people across geographic boundaries.
It can also generate misinformation, intensify division, imitate human identity, eliminate jobs, manipulate emotions, and allow organizations to communicate at scale without creating a single moment of authentic human connection.
The technology itself does not make the final leadership decision. We do.
Reach Is Not the Same as Connection
Artificial intelligence can give a leader extraordinary reach. It can help write a message, create a presentation, translate a speech, analyze an audience, generate a video, answer customer questions, and distribute content worldwide in seconds.
But reach and connection are not the same thing.
A message can reach thousands of people without making one person feel understood. A company can automate every customer touchpoint and still make its customers feel abandoned. An executive can publish more content than ever before while becoming less visible, less personal, and less trusted. A team can communicate constantly through digital systems and still lose its sense of community.
That is why I frequently remind leaders:
Technology amplifies communication. Humanity creates connections.
Technology may carry your words, but your humanity gives those words meaning.
It is your empathy, judgment, character, presence, and willingness to listen that allow people to experience the person behind the message. Artificial intelligence can help prepare the communication.
It cannot assume the leader’s responsibility to connect.
The Real Danger Is Not Only What AI May Become
Much of the public conversation about AI focuses on the future.
Will it become too powerful?
Will it eliminate millions of jobs?
Will it eventually operate beyond meaningful human control?
Those are legitimate questions. Pope Leo has previously warned that humanity has a duty to remain “profoundly human” as AI introduces new risks of dehumanization. His 2026 encyclical, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
Magnifica Humanitas calls for ethical governance, human oversight, and the protection of human dignity.
But there is another danger already in front of us. It is the temptation for leaders to use AI as a substitute for the difficult human parts of leadership. It’s easier to generate a polished announcement than to stand before employees and explain a painful decision. It’s now easier to deploy an automated customer service agent than to listen patiently to a frustrated customer. It is easier to analyze employee sentiment than to sit with people and ask what they are experiencing. And, it’s now easier to produce a stream of leadership content than to engage in a genuine conversation where the leader does not control every word.
Efficiency is valuable—but efficiency cannot become an excuse for emotional distance.
Sometimes, the most important leadership communication will not be the fastest, cheapest, or most scalable option.
It will be the most human one.
AI Anxiety Is Already a Leadership Issue
The anxiety surrounding AI is not theoretical.
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index examined workplace signals and surveyed 20,000 AI-using employees across 10 countries. It found real anxiety about job security and the pressure workers feel to keep pace with rapidly changing technology.
Adecco’s 2026 Business Leaders research reports that 45% of leaders expect AI agents to enter workflows within the next year. Yet only 36% of talent strategies demonstrate how AI will create opportunities for people.
That gap matters.
Employees do not experience AI merely as a new piece of software. They may experience it as a question about their future, their security, and even their personal value. If leadership communicates only about productivity, speed, and cost reduction, people will fill the silence with their own fears:
Will this technology replace me?
Does my experience still matter?
Is the company preparing me for the future—or preparing a future without me?
A leader cannot eliminate every uncertainty. But that leader can acknowledge the uncertainty, communicate honestly, listen seriously, and explain how decisions are being made. Silence will not prevent fear.
Human communication can keep fear from becoming isolation.
Three Questions Every Leader Should Ask
Before introducing another AI system, automation, communication platform, or virtual agent, leaders should ask three questions.
1. Does this strengthen or weaken the human connection?
Do not measure success only by how much time or money the technology saves.
Ask how people will feel when they encounter it.
Will customers feel helped or dismissed?
Will employees feel supported or monitored?
Will people retain a clear path to a human being when circumstances become complicated, emotional, or personal?
If automation removes friction but also removes empathy, leadership must reconsider the design.
2. Are we being transparent about how AI is being used?
People deserve to know when they are interacting with artificial intelligence—especially when the communication involves employment, money, healthcare, personal information, or other consequential decisions. Transparency builds trust.
Deception, even when technically sophisticated, destroys it.
Leaders should clearly communicate what AI is doing, what information it uses, where human judgment remains involved, and how people can question or appeal an outcome.
3. Are we using AI to serve people—or using people to serve AI?
This may be the most important question. Technology should support human purpose. Human beings should not be forced to reorganize their dignity, identity, and worth around the demands of a system.
AI should free people to contribute more creativity, discernment, compassion, relationships, and wisdom—not merely make it easier to remove them from the process.
The most advanced organization will not necessarily be the one with the most AI. It may be the one that knows exactly where AI belongs—and where a human being still matters more.
This Is Where the H.E.A.R.T. Method™ Matters
Pope Leo’s message strongly intersects with three principles in my H.E.A.R.T. Method™ leadership communication framework.
Human Connection
Never allow the system's efficiency to erase a person's humanity.
Every employee, customer, colleague, and stakeholder wants to feel seen, heard, and valued. AI may help facilitate that experience, but leaders must remain accountable for creating it.
Emotional Intention
Leaders must consider not only what a message says but also how the audience will feel when receiving it. Will an AI announcement create curiosity, confidence, fear, or confusion?
If leaders do not intentionally address the emotional experience surrounding technological change, they leave emotion to rumor, speculation, and resistance.
Authentic Authority
Strong leadership does not pretend to possess every answer.
Authentic authority means communicating what you know, acknowledging what you do not know, explaining the values guiding your decisions, and remaining present when people ask difficult questions. That is how credibility is established in uncertain times.
Every Leader Is Now an AI Broadcaster
Throughout my broadcasting career, I learned that having access to a powerful microphone comes with responsibility. You must consider the accuracy of the information, the audience's needs, the moment's emotion, and the consequences of delivering the message.
Today, AI gives every leader an extraordinarily powerful amplifier. It can multiply a message, reproduce a voice, generate an image, simulate a conversation, and influence people the leader may never meet. That makes leadership communication more consequential—not less.
The greater the reach of our technology, the greater our responsibility to protect humanity on the other side of it.
Pope Leo’s message gives leaders a timely challenge:
Build technology that serves humanity without slowly removing the human from the experience.
Your Leadership Signal
Before your organization introduces its next AI-powered tool, ask your team:
How will this technology help people feel more informed, supported, valued, and connected?
If you cannot answer that clearly, the technology may be ready, but your leadership strategy is not.
Bring More H.E.A.R.T. Into Your Leadership Communication
Rich “Trigger” Bontrager helps executives, leadership teams, and organizations communicate with greater clarity, confidence, credibility, and authentic human connection.
Through Lead Through The Lens™ and the H.E.A.R.T. Method™, Trigger combines more than 35 years of professional broadcasting experience with practical leadership communication strategies for today’s camera-first, AI-influenced world.
Explore leadership keynotes or start a conversation with Trigger about strengthening trust and human connection throughout your organization.
About Rich “Trigger” Bontrager
Rich “Trigger” Bontrager is America’s Leadership Broadcaster™, a leadership communication strategist, keynote speaker, professional broadcaster, producer, and creator of the H.E.A.R.T. Method™.
Based in the Washington, DC region, Trigger works with leaders and organizations across the United States and internationally.
Learn more at RichBontrager.net.
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