This is the second in a series of guest posts spotlighting work across the Buddhism and AI landscape. This post was authored by Benjamin Olsen, Executive Director of Faith Family Technology Network, an alliance of religious, academic, policy, and technology leaders committed to building a tech future that serves human dignity and the flourishing of all communities and traditions.
Faith is a word I didn’t use when I was guiding Microsoft employees in meditation during the pandemic. For several years, I was a practicing Buddhist of the more secular kind, and faith was something that belonged in my past.
However, the deeper I got into my studies, the more I discovered that Buddhism has a profound collection of teachings around the definition, mystery, and psychology of faith. Eventually, through my own explorations of heart meditations and the Brahmaviharas, I was led back to my Eastern Catholic faith. I still carry with me the fruits, friendships, and lessons from Buddhism with immense gratitude.
Now that I lead the nonprofit Faith Family Technology Network (FFTN), I’ve also found that the Buddhist understanding of faith provides a bridge to greater AI collaboration across religious traditions. As is the case in most religions, Buddhism is not a monolith, and my primary interpretation of faith here comes from Sharon Salzberg. In Sharon’s book on faith, she writes that “in Pali, the language of the original Buddhist texts, the word usually translated as faith, confidence, or trust is saddha. Saddha literally means ‘to place the heart upon.’” It is also “a verb… Faith is not a singular state… but is something we do. We ‘faithe’.”
At FFTN, we “faithe” from our respective religious traditions, political lines, and convictions, bringing our collective wisdom together to understand issues and opportunities on the AI frontier, and addressing them through collective action. With op-eds, a statement signed by more than 50+ faith and AI leaders (including BAII’s Chris Scammell) and an amicus brief, we stood together against potential uses of autonomous weapons and the possibility of mass surveillance with AI. We contributed to the Religious Freedom Commission’s 250th anniversary work to promote religious freedom for all faiths as AI starts to impact the practice of religion. And we helped Anthropic find the right people to convene multifaith and Christian leaders at their headquarters, with members DZ Kalman, Waleed Kadous, Ron Ivey, and many others from FFTN participating. We have over 140+ experts in the network--and growing. Since early 2025, we’ve held weekly virtual gatherings where the latest happenings around faith, family, and AI are shared, and where experts offer deep dives and discussions. Along with BAII, many other new and exciting organizations are joining this work alongside FFTN, such as the Noēsis Collaborative, the Future of Life Institute, the Institute for Family Studies (FFTN’s parent nonprofit), Americans for Responsible Innovation, Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence, and AI and Faith.
When Chris offered an overview of BAII’s work at FFTN, it sparked many new connections for us. One of our members highlighted the many issues stemming from AI personas and agentic capabilities, ranging from AI psychosis to lesser forms of confusion and deception with chatbots, then asked: from a Buddhist perspective, what if an egoless AI system could help us without simulating personas in ways that harm? Chris made the point that Buddhism could help us find a middle path forward with agentic AI systems while also holding the “persona” or character-like aspects lightly. In FFTN, we have a working group of technical experts that are investigating this opportunity with the Buddhism & AI Initiative and are exploring complementary ways to address hyper-personification that are pluralistic and communally informed.
Buddhist AI efforts along with Buddhist-inspired interfaith work are essential to the flourishing of the multifaith and AI movement. I especially think of the Bodhisattva vow when I imagine what’s possible with AI systems and Buddhism: “Even if the sun were to rise in the west, the bodhisattva has only one way” (Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind): the way of compassion for all sentient beings. Advances in Buddhist approaches to AI alignment and benchmarking, wise AI governance in corporations, and Buddhist-infused AI policies and practices—especially in areas like AI in war and peacebuilding and thought leadership regarding the nature of AI systems themselves—are just a slice of the many ways Buddhism can be a guiding light for AI and our flourishing.
Another pillar of FFTN’s mission is to champion the family as “the fundamental and irreplaceable cell of every community organization” (Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas) through technological change. Applications of Buddhist wisdom on the family (from the eightfold path and more) to AI systems is a rich area we would like to research in FFTN.
In between family units and our one human family are our communities like FFTN and BAII: our sanghas, places of brotherhood and sisterhood, our colleagues, our friends on the spiritual path. In these forums, “heart speaks to heart” (the Catholic Saint John Henry Newman’s motto). And Pope Leo XIV writes : “true progress always stems from a heart open to others” (Magnifica Humanitas). We make true progress when we create spaces for encounter, dialogue, and solutioning for our human family and those in need: “One of the meanings of ‘saddha’ is hospitality. Faith is about opening up and making room for the most painful experiences” (Salzberg).
We believe that we all are beginning a new phase of faith and AI, and we need Buddhist AI leaders to walk together with people of all faiths for the betterment of our systems as well as our societies.
May our movement be a place of transformation, peace, and renewal for us as we faithe with all that we have.
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Benjamin Olsen is the Executive Director of Faith Family Technology Network and the founder of interintelligence, an AI advisory services company. He co-founded Microsoft's T4RE initiative, is a pioneer in AI Ethics at Microsoft, and advises the AI & Spirituality Initiative at the Neurospirituality Lab at Harvard Medical School.
Ben's doing great work here. I think he's done a great job of representing Catholics while making sure every faith gets a seat at the table of AI ethics debate.
The framing here is rare and worth taking seriously. Faith communities tend to arrive late to technology debates — but that delay might actually be an advantage. Arriving without the pressure to monetize or scale means asking different questions: not "how do we deploy this?" but "what kind of human life does this enable?" The challenge is whether that perspective gets a real seat at the table, or remains a footnote in conversations already shaped by the infrastructure builders.