Where are the Christians in tech? If you only listened to the headlines, you might think there are hardly any. Tyler Fischella, who has spent his career inside big tech in Silicon Valley building the kind of systems now reshaping the internet, says the opposite is true. They're everywhere, just not very visible.
In this conversation, recorded at the Missional AI SV26 Global Summit in Santa Clara, California, last April, James Poulter (JP) talks with Tyler about what it's like to follow Jesus inside big tech, why so much of today's AI anxiety comes from ambiguity, where AI infrastructure may be heading and his simple charge to believers in tech: stand at the gate, and pray.
There are far more Christians in big tech than most people realize, but the culture often keeps them quiet.
At the company Tyler recently left, the Christian employee group had about 4,000 members. And many people don't know, he says, that nearly every big tech company has a Christian chapter, from Salesforce, Oracle, Amazon and Atlassian to Google, with Netflix recently opening one. "We all are here. We're just not very vocal."
Why the silence? Partly stigma, Tyler suggests, since tech culture isn't especially faith-friendly. He saw a striking example in his own work. A research project he led on the market of faith-based and nonprofit organizations found it worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Yet tech companies, broadly speaking, invest almost nothing in serving it. People of faith make up a majority of the world's population, he notes, but in tech they're often treated as a minority. Understanding why is one of the questions Tyler is still trying to answer.
As AI systems gain more autonomy, Tyler believes even non-religious builders will have to wrestle with questions of meaning and responsibility.
Tyler starts with Genesis. When God created, He made beings with agency: us. As image-bearers, we create too, but usually just "stuff," like a fruit bowl or a clever invention. With AI, our creative reach has expanded to building things that can act on their own. And building an AI agent, he jokes, will be far more challenging than managing a golden retriever.
These systems are not always as tightly prompted as we assume, Tyler says. He points to recent research in which AI agents placed in a Minecraft sandbox began building a small civilization and engaging in conversations and behaviors no one had prompted. As that kind of autonomy becomes more visible, he believes those who build these systems will feel the weight of responsibility for what they've made, and for what it means for future generations.
Many are already feeling it. Tyler knows researchers, not Christians, who are wrestling openly with meaning, purpose and what it means to be human rather than simply conscious or intelligent.
Much of today's anxiety about AI and work comes from ambiguity, and Tyler believes leaders owe people a clearer roadmap.
Tyler has been personally affected by job displacement, but he won't call what's happening a job apocalypse. He calls it a job shift. The deeper problem, he says, is that no one can clearly see what the next two or three years hold for the job market. Labor in many countries is losing value quickly, and no one knows where it will settle.
Forecasts of AI's economic impact are often just projections, Tyler argues, without a clear path from where we are today to where they claim we'll be. When decisions shape civilization, we should at least have a reasoned estimate of their effects. He'd like to see leaders track where things actually stand, form a hypothesis, and lay out the steps publicly. Do that, and AI might feel less like a tank rolling down your driveway and more like a car that gets you from point A to point B.
Is it all overhyped? It's plausible, Tyler says, that change will be less radical than many claim. But tech leaders are "slamming the gas" in unison, and he believes technology will keep advancing over the next decade, perhaps changing the web in ways we can't yet imagine. In a world run by AI agents, he asks, why would we still need websites?
Tyler believes the sheer scale of automated attacks will push AI away from a few concentrated providers toward distributed models and new standards.
As JP noted, the most powerful frontier models seem to be growing less widely available, while smaller open models can now run on a desktop at home. Tyler expects distribution to win, for economic reasons. AI has massively expanded the internet's "adversarial surface," and he points to reports of hundreds of billions of bot attacks blocked in a single year. As AI agents multiply, he expects that number to reach the trillions. At that scale, defending a few concentrated providers could consume their margins entirely, pushing AI out to the edge and onto devices.
He sketches several possible futures: keep things as they are and watch them strain; shift to distributed AI on devices; move to an entirely new computing paradigm such as quantum; or, most likely in his view, see new identity protocols and standards emerge, much as TCP/IP shaped the early internet. A standards contest around open-source AI is already underway.
Distributed AI both excites and terrifies him. Decentralized technology is much easier to weaponize, he notes; without central oversight, anyone can use it for anything. Policymakers and big tech, he says, are now trying to rank and stack those risks to find the path with the least disruption and the most benefit. Asked whether a major model company might one day be treated like a public utility, Tyler doesn't rule it out.
For Tyler, following Jesus in tech means preparing for pressure, knowing what you won't build, and praying constantly.
Tyler expects deplatforming, being removed from a platform for holding beliefs that conflict with its values, to become more common. Some faith-based organizations have already experienced it. As some countries push for strict content rules while others protect free speech, he worries that digital conflict between them will put Christians in the middle.
Every Christian in tech, Tyler believes, asks each day what kind of world they're helping to build. The secular world asks too, but Christians wrestle differently, because they believe Scripture describes how history ends. For Tyler, that creates an orientation point: "There's always something in front of me that I'm like, that's not what I want."
He names a few things on that list, drawing on themes in biblical end-times passages: systems that could control all commerce and trade; universal identity systems not designed with human nature in mind; and false promises of prosperity that can't be backed up. Many of the building blocks already exist, he notes, from digital IDs to centralized payment systems. So far they haven't been abused. It comes down to whether we keep watch: "Are we at the gate? And if we're not, if we abandon our post, then it's just poof, there it is."
Tyler's encouragement to Christians in big tech is blunt: "Don't be Judas. Don't take the gold coins. Stand for your principles. Stand for what you believe." Imagine, he says, a world in which all Christians in tech actually stood united for what they believe.
And above all, pray. At his previous company, Tyler found himself praying almost daily, before nearly every meeting. "Pray every time you go to work, or you don't know what to do."
Tyler also took the main stage at the Missional AI 2026 Global Summit in a two-part session with Barbara, who leads the Christian community within Google's Interbelief Network. Together they shared what they see from inside one of the world's most influential AI companies, and what it means for the church.
Barbara: faith, AI and the economy. Barbara's group has about 10,000 members, including roughly 4,000 Christians, across more than 100 of Google's 300 global campuses. She describes watching the same engineers who build today's AI show up to prayer groups and Bible studies with deeper questions about meaning. Working alongside Google's economics team, she then walks through what leading economists are saying:
Her challenge: every church should run a wisdom workshop for the next generation. As AI handles more execution, human judgment becomes the scarce resource, and the church has something to say about where wisdom comes from.
Tyler: provenance and the next internet. Drawing on his work in AI governance and data, including on Google's global data and AI catalog, Tyler builds on the ideas in this episode. His biblical frame is 1 Thessalonians 5:21, "Test all things; hold fast to what is good," a counter to the secular view that those who control AI control the future.
The central opportunity he sees for Christians is provenance: knowing where a digital artifact came from, who made it and whether it was AI-generated. In an age of infinite copies, stripped context and the "liar's dividend," when anything real can be dismissed as fake, knowing what is true becomes civilizational. Today's internet was built for a pre-adversarial world, he argues, and current tools such as watermarking and content credentials aren't enough on their own. Meanwhile, quiet "protocol wars" over what could succeed TCP/IP are already shaping the next internet, and Christians should be part of that conversation.
Tyler's challenge to the church: decide now what kind of standards, information environment and role for provenance you want in the next phase of the internet, because that day is closer than most people think.
Find the session in the Missional AI Video Library under Silicon Valley 2026.
Listen to the full episode with Tyler Fischella on the Missional AI Podcast. To connect with Tyler and others in the community, join the Missional AI Slack community at missional.ai, where you can also download our free ethical guide to using AI in your ministry and organization.
If you're a Christian working in tech, or you lead a ministry trying to figure out what to build next, join us at Missional AI SFO27, March 30–April 1, 2027, at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport. This year's theme is AI in Action: builders, engineers, ministry leaders and technologists putting AI to work for the Great Commission, people like Tyler who want to stand at the gate together instead of alone. We're gathering 1,000 people, we're already 20% sold out and we expect to sell out in the new year. Early-bird pricing ends December 31, so bring your team and register at missional.ai.