In March, three months after being forced out of his position as the CEO of Intel and sued by shareholders, Patrick Gelsinger took the reins at Gloo, a technology company made for what he calls the “faith ecosystem” – think Salesforce for churches, plus chatbots and AI assistants for automating pastoral work and ministry support.
The former CEO’s career pivot is taking place as the US tech industry returns to the political realm as a major revenue stream. Some of its most prominent present-day leaders have funded Donald Trump’s re-election and renewed their pursuit of government contracts as the second Trump administration has revitalized religious conservatism in Washington DC.
Now Gloo’s executive chairman and head of technology (and largely free of the shareholder suit), Gelsinger has made it a core mission to soft-power advance the company’s Christian principles in Silicon Valley, the halls of Congress, and beyond, armed with a fundraised war chest of a $110m. His call to action is also a pitch for AI aligned with Christian values: tech products like those built by Gloo, many of which are built on top of existing large language models, but adjusted to reflect users’ theological beliefs.
“My life mission has been [to] work on a piece of technology that would improve the quality of life of every human on the planet and hasten the coming of Christ’s return,” he said.
Gloo says it serves “over 140,000 faith, ministry and nonprofit leaders”. Though its intended customers are not the same, Gloo’s user base pales in comparison with those of AI industry titans: some 800 million active users rely on ChatGPT every week, not to mention Claude, Grok and others.
Religiosity like Gelsinger’s – a born-again Christian who has referred to Silicon Valley as his “mission field” – is shaping Silicon Valley’s culture in its image. Where there was once purported atheism, there is now “a very loud, very visible, and very specifically Christian-inflected technological culture” in Silicon Valley, said Damien Williams, a scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who studies how technologies are shaped by religious beliefs. It’s exemplified by figures like Peter Thiel – who warns of the coming of the antichrist if humanity fails to work toward certain technological frameworks – and Andreessen Horowitz’s Katherine Boyle, a close friend of JD Vance, the vice-president. Gelsinger has long been outspoken about his Christian values, helping found Transforming the Bay With Christ in 2013, an organization aiming to ignite a Christian spiritual movement in the region.
Speaking on 7 October at a seminar co-hosted by Gloo, Colorado Christian University, a conservative college, and the Christian…
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