SynopsisPope Leo's new encyclical on AI is not going to add a single line to anyone's statute book. What it does is move the Overton window — pulling AI ethics out of the comfortable middle ground where vendors, regulators and boardrooms have parked it for the last two years. Once a moral authority of that reach plants a flag on dignity, labor displacement and data exploitation, the political and reputational cost of staying vague on AI governance goes up sharply for everyone trying to play both sides of the debate.
Yvette Schmitter, CEO of Fusion Collective, sat down with Mike Vizard to unpack what that shift actually demands of leaders. Her starting frame is the gap she keeps seeing between what AI vendors say in public and how they lobby behind closed doors — a gap that is no longer survivable as scrutiny intensifies. Ethics that lives only in legal, she argues, is not ethics. It is a paper trail designed to survive a deposition, not a guide for how a company actually behaves.
Schmitter lays out four concrete moves any leader can make this quarter without waiting for regulation to catch up. Start with an honest absence audit — what governance, accountability and oversight does your AI program lack right now, and who owns each gap. Move governance out of legal and into the operating teams that actually build and deploy the systems. Wire accountability checkpoints directly into the development workflow rather than bolting reviews onto the end. And treat data, not just consumer votes, as the currency companies are quietly counting on people to hand over without thinking.
The throughline is responsibility — the idea that owning your data and your decisions is no longer rhetorical posture, it is the strategic asset that determines whether an enterprise leads or follows in the AI era. The Overton window has moved. The leaders who recognize that and act with clear eyes will set the standard everyone else eventually has to live up to.