Your Eminences, Your Excellencies, distinguished guests,
Thank you President Garonna and the Fondazione Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice for the invitation to join you today. It is a genuine privilege to be part of a conversation that this Foundation has been shaping, with remarkable consistency and intellectual courage, for more than thirty years.
As many speakers have already acknowledged at the start of the week, Pope Leo XIV issued his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. Signed 135 years after Rerum Novarum it sends a very clear signal that the disruptions reshaping work, dignity, technology and power today are as consequential and as important as those of the Industrial Revolution.
Rerum Novarum defended the dignity of workers after the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution.
Magnifica Humanitas asks a related question for our own age: in a world shaped by algorithms, by artificial intelligence, how do we ensure that AI serves human dignity – and does not reduce people to data, productivity, or control?
Across more than a century of Catholic social teaching — from Rerum Novarum to Pacem in Terris, from Caritas in Veritate to Laudato Si’ — one consistent principle emerges: economic and technological progress only become meaningful when they serve human dignity and the common good.
That is not only a moral framework. Increasingly, it is a development framework as well.
Because the defining challenges of our time — fragility, climate change, pandemics, debt, migration, and now artificial intelligence — do not recognize borders. They cannot be solved by countries acting alone, nor by institutions retreating into narrower definitions of national interest.
The answer is not less cooperation. It is better cooperation. Cooperation that is more legitimate, more effective, but also more grounded in the lives of ordinary people.
In my work, I spend a lot of time with young people – at universities, in communities, in the countries where the World Bank Group serves. And each time, I come away with a sense of optimism that I find difficult to shake, even in difficult moments.
And this is not because the problems are not real, but I do have the sense that the younger generation is asking the right questions. Not only how do we grow? What can technology do? But what should it be used for? These are precisely the questions this Foundation has been asking for over thirty years. The debate is now catching up. The world is also changing.
Over the next ten to fifteen years, 1.2 billion young people in developing economies will reach working age. Current projections suggest that only around 400 million jobs will be created during this same period, leaving 800 million people without the prospect of a job.
Behind those numbers are human lives: hundreds of millions of young people entering adulthood without access to dignified work, without a foothold in their economy, without a sense that the future is something they can economically participate in.
The implications of the current trends are particularly stark for Africa. By 2050, one in four people on the planet will be African. That development alone should sharpen our collective focus.
Without jobs, without hope for the future, frustration does not remain local. It feeds fragility, conflict, and political radicalization that is already reshaping societies across the world.
The institutions built to deal with these shared challenges – the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the multilateral system as a whole – are facing a new environment.
They are facing a world of geopolitical competition, of shrinking budgetary resources, and at times we face our own challenges internally regarding our own slowness and our own complexity.
Let me say here that the answer has to be reform. There has to be a focus on achieving more. Our answer The answer cannot be retreat.
At the World Bank Group, we want to move faster, we want to achieve more, looking at solutions that can be common in the face of great common opportunities and challenges on our planet, and ultimately our ability to achieve this will matter far more than how we measure the volumes of finance or internal metrics of change.
Because for us reform is about legitimacy, it is about respecting the dignity of those we serve, and therefore we measure our efforts by whether we can serve the people that we want to empower, particularly the most vulnerable. The farmer who cannot access a market. The young woman who cannot get a loan. The child whose clinic has no medicines. The moment we lose sight of that person, we lose sight of our own purpose.
That is why at the heart of our work is the recognition of the value of jobs, and this is beaucause jobs are not just about income, they are about helping create a sense of dignity, helping to deepen participation in society, in belief in the future, and the encyclical of this week puts this with striking clarity.
It recognizes as quoted in the encyclical that the “the human person is an end, not a means”.
That is not only a moral statement. It is a development imperative.
And then there is artificial intelligence – which will shape the jobs agenda for the next decade.
The concerns surrounding AI are legitimate. Indeed, they sit at the heart of Magnifica Humanitas.
In advanced economies, AI is already slowing hiring in services and white-collar sectors and concentrating technology power rather than distributing opportunity more broadly.
Pope Leo XIII looked at the factories of the Industrial Revolution and saw workers stripped of dignity, subject to forces they had not chosen and could not control.
Pope Leo XIV is confronting a similar risk today: that unprecedented technology power, left ungoverned and unguided by ethics and public purpose, could concentrate wealth influence and excludes billions of people from its benefits.
But the picture is not only of risk – particularly for developing countries. Because there is another version of AI that deserves far greater attention “Small AI”: locally delivered, running on a smartphone, adapted to local languages and local realities, and designed to extend, to build human capability rather than replace it.
At a farmers’ cooperative, we’ve seen women use their phones to scan a diseased crop and instantly get answers. With a simple tap, they receive a diagnosis and a recommended treatment—right there. There is no data center, no supercomputer. For these farmers, AI is not a threat—it’s a gateway to faster, more affordable solutions.
But this version of AI only becomes possible if developing countries are active participants in shaping AI — not passive consumers.
If the global conversation on AI is captured entirely by the logic of large systems – built and controlled by a handful of companies in few countries – then the developing world risk being left behind. We risk creating a new form of technological dependency that deepens existing inequalities.
And this is where the encyclical speaks with particular force. Pope Leo XIVs reminds us that development must concern “each man and the whole man”. Human beings remain at the center of technological progress.
That principle increasingly shapes how we approach digital development at the World Bank Group.
For many countries, the greatest AI risk is not only misuse. It is exclusion. Exclusion from infrastructure, from connectivity, from skills, from compute capacity, from trusted governance systems, and ultimately from the economic gains AI could generate.
Our response therefore will be one that is practical and inclusive: expanding digital access, affordability, skills, capability, and trusted AI readiness across developing economies. This is at the heart of our Digital and AI Implementation Plan, which aims to help extend digital opportunity and AI-enabled development to one billion people by 2030.
That is why we are committed to deepening our dialogue with the Holy See and strengthening our partnership with faith-based organizations: because we know that partnership, grounded in shared values, is how we unlock real impact.
Thirty-five years ago, we were reminded that markets without moral foundations do not produce justice. Magnifica Humanitas offers a similar warning for the age of artificial intelligence: intelligence without conscience cannot be the basis for human progress.
So while the World Bank cannot provide that conscience. We can choose to work alongside those who help sustain it — and be held accountable by that standard.
That is the partnership I am here to affirm today.
READ MORE: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/speech/2026/05/29/international-conference-of-the-fondazione-centesimus-annus-pro-pontifice
