Technology for Religious Empowerment

Going forward, our research agenda is organized around five core areas supporting religious empowerment.

1. Innovating technology with and for religious communities
We aim to move beyond reactive adoption, fostering proactive codesign with religious communities. We began exploring this during the late summer 2025 with hackathon theme we developed in collaboration with Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer and our nonprofit platform Elevate that focused for the first time on empowering religious non-profits including International Religious Freedom Secretariat (opens in new tab), the Templeton Foundation (opens in new tab) and AI & Faith (opens in new tab), which we will continue to collaborate with and support in the coming months. We have also supported the launching of the Vatican’s Builders AI (opens in new tab) forum.

2. Making sure our existing offerings serve religious communities too
We recognize that religious communities have specific, often unarticulated needs—from concerns about children interacting with AI companion apps to religiously-grounded content customization and theologically-grounded perspectives on image-based abuse. Building on our red-teaming work this summer, we plan to continue to provide grounded input to help ensure our products meet the needs in both functionality and security of religious communities.

3. Ecosystem leadership
With the field of technoreligious systems still emerging, we believe there is a critical opportunity to offer technical insights that can help make the emerging agenda actionable. As such, we plan to build on our review discussed above with further work that shapes the intersection between religion and technology broadly. Specifically, we plan to focus on ways, grounded in the research of Plural Technology Collaboratory (opens in new tab), that advanced digital technologies can bolster values of community in an age of pluralism, AI and long-distance communication.

4. Understanding stakeholder perceptions and insights
We plan to build on our landscape study above to continue to map the needs and perceptions of religious stakeholders in the technology industry, ensure our outreach in both research and product includes a diverse and representative set of religious stakeholders and to support external researchers in extending our analysis in more quantitative and representative directions.

5. Standards and social organization
As technology regulation increasingly intersects with religious authority, we are studying the political dynamics of religiously motivated policy and collaborating with leading theorists to envision sustainable principles for technology deployment, especially in the developing world.

These five areas guide our work as we strive to make Microsoft technologies more inclusive, responsive, and to make Microsoft technologies more inclusive, responsive, and empowering everyone – including religious communities globally. 

Please reach out to Glen Weyl (glenweyl@microsoft.com) for more information.