YouVersion recently celebrated a milestone few could have imagined: its Bible app installed on a billion devices. Founder and CEO Bobby Gruenewald believes AI is helping fuel a fresh hunger for God's Word, and that the next billion will come far faster.
In this episode, James Poulter (JP), a longtime friend and collaborator, talks with Bobby about why people are seeking trusted truth in an AI age, how YouVersion is opening its technology to developers, why it's reshaping its team without shrinking it, and what Bobby is learning from running AI agents himself.
YouVersion's billion-install milestone is one sign of something larger: in an age of AI-generated content, people are searching for what they can trust, and the Bible stands alone.
When they started, Bobby says, they had no idea what God would do. YouVersion isn't usually good at celebrating; at half a billion, the celebration was a dinner for twenty people. But this time they used the milestone to draw attention not to themselves but to the Bible, with a global broadcast celebrating God's Word. It's one indicator of what God is doing with Scripture worldwide: more people reading and listening to the Bible, and print Bible sales rising, especially among Gen Z.
Bobby doesn't think that's an accident. Most people aren't thinking about AI on a deep philosophical level, and some fear about jobs exists, but the bigger effect so far is doubt about content itself. Generative AI's first big use was content creation, and machines can produce it far faster than people. Almost everyone has been fooled by a convincing video that wasn't true. Gen Z has grown up assuming they can't automatically trust what they see, especially if it was recently generated.
That skepticism sends people looking for what's true. The Bible stands alone, carefully passed down for thousands of years. Visit the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Museum of the Bible, Bobby says, and you can see that consistency for yourself. It's also why print Bibles are resurging: a physical, tangible book feels more trustworthy.
YouVersion's vision is God's Word for everyone, everywhere, every day, an infinite vision no single organization can reach alone.
That's why YouVersion launched the YouVersion Platform, giving away what it has learned and built. Working with Biblica as lead publisher and now many others, it created express licenses so developers can instantly license Bible text. Today, about 300 Bible versions are available. Developers can sign up for a free account and access APIs and SDKs to bring Scripture into their own apps, websites and experiences for non-commercial use.
Since launching in December, more than 1,500 developers have signed up. One built a Roblox experience that generated 15 million API calls in its first three months. YouVersion is also partnering with organizations like BibleProject and Come and See to bring Scripture into their experiences.
The first billion installs took 17 years. At today's pace, Bobby expects the second billion in five years or less and the third in three or less, and he suspects even that is too small for a God who does immeasurably more than we ask or imagine. The platform could be key, because it grows exponentially, and AI makes it easier than ever to build quickly. AI is great at writing code, but builders still need APIs and SDKs to plug into. The platform arrives at just the right moment.
AI is making YouVersion feel like its early startup days again, and Bobby is clear that the goal is more impact, not fewer people.
Bobby is a little nostalgic for YouVersion's earliest days. The tiny team moved fast, building for around ten mobile platforms at once, partly because they didn't know what they couldn't do. As organizations grow, they usually become less efficient. Now, because AI is rapidly improving how teams code, it feels like those early days again. YouVersion is reshaping its entire team in phases around AI-native ways of working, without a playbook to follow.
He's firm that this isn't about cutting staff. A hundred AI-native engineers and designers is great, he says, but not better than a thousand. With an infinite vision, YouVersion optimizes for impact, not profit, so the aim is to grow, not shrink. He's even inviting people to join the team.
The biggest change he asks of his team is learning to handle change itself. He's studying the traits of people who are adapting well, which shape who they hire. And organizational structures will likely keep evolving, because there's no fixed destination.
YouVersion is opening small, local hubs around the world, because its work depends on relationships with partners and churches.
YouVersion remains committed to its in-person culture in Edmond, Oklahoma. But Bobby notes that the app depends entirely on partners: Bible publishers, plus the human-created plans, videos and guided Scripture content from churches and ministries worldwide. YouVersion has chosen human-generated content over AI-written content, and that reflects the strength of the global church.
Relationships can't all be built from one place, so YouVersion is hiring local teams native to each culture. It now has hubs in Brazil, Mexico City, Australia, Kenya, South Africa and Germany, with Paris, Nigeria and London coming soon, and more planned across Asia and the Arabic-speaking world, perhaps 20 or more in all. Each team is small, about six to ten people, and they handle church relationships, regional communications and user feedback. Partners like BibleProject, Come and See and The Chosen are starting to colocate in these hubs too, so they serve the wider ecosystem.
Bobby is deep into experimenting with AI agents, and it's taught him how easily even experts can be fooled by technology that sounds smart.
Bobby is running 16 AI agents, mostly built on the open-source OpenClaw framework, and using about a billion tokens a week. He isn't an engineer, so his goal is to learn what an executive's rhythms could look like with agents. One agent, triggered by a text message, can download an app onto a phone, walk through its onboarding, take screenshots and write him a report.
But he's honest about the risks. It can feel like late-night gaming: hours disappear, and you're left wondering what you actually accomplished. He points to a study where developers using AI felt about 20% faster but actually took about 19% longer. And as someone who goes deep on everything, from AI to becoming a pilot and flight instructor, he admits it can fill every crack of his life. During a recent spring break he tested whether he could go without sleep as he once did. "Turns out that doesn't work the same way."
Throughout history, humans have equated fluency with intelligence. AI's breakthrough is that, for the first time, technology is super fluent; it sounds like a smart person. So we assume super fluency means super intelligence, which isn't necessarily true.
Bobby learned this firsthand. An AI confidently told him, with a link to a reference, that his children's school district had Good Friday off. It didn't, and he believed it for over a week, until his wife set him straight. JP admits that the more he uses AI, the more likely he is to be the one hallucinating. Bobby also points to Microsoft's terms of use, which he says describe Copilot as for entertainment purposes only, even as ads promote it as a business tool.
His antidote: step back, take a deep breath and stay focused on the mission. However exciting the technology, it ultimately has to connect with human beings, and we need human ways to connect with it ourselves.
Bobby also spoke on the main stage at the Missional AI 2026 Global Summit in Silicon Valley. Watch his keynote, "Hunger for Truth in the AI Age," in the Missional AI Video Library under Silicon Valley 2026, or in the SV26 Keynotes playlist on YouTube. You can also watch the SV26 workshop "Build with the YouVersion Platform: Free Bible APIs, SDKs & AI Skills."
Listen to the full episode with Bobby Gruenewald on the Missional AI Podcast, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Missional AI London returns this July, bringing together a couple of hundred people from across Europe and beyond in central London to explore life at the intersection of faith and AI. Register at missional.ai, where you can also join the Slack community and download Missional AI's free ebook guide to using AI ethically in ministry.
This episode was made possible in partnership with Gloo, the technology platform connecting the faith ecosystem.