On May 20th, 2026, alignAI doctoral candidate Julia Li from the IEAI at the Technical University of Munich, supervized by Institute Director Prof. Christoph Lütge, and Annabelle Bernard from United Way Greater Toronto presented their work titled, “Core Value Conflicts of Early and Prospective LLM and AI Adopters in the Non-profit Sector”. The presentation spotlighted how non-profit organizations (NPOs) who have recently adopted or are looking to adopt the use of large language models (LLMs) are navigating opportunities and barriers. Furthermore, they looked at important value tensions inherent to equity-centered organizations which influence the behavior of NPOs around LLMs.
By bringing sector-specific context into previously explored values such as accuracy and trust, this work explored how organizational and personal values relate to the preferences and behaviors of key stakeholders. Using interview data from NPOs primarily in the greater Toronto area, the study spotlighted how organization-level decision-making about technology and protecting sensitive information could be affected by context-specific factors such as staff dynamics and client demographics. Finally, they presented a value conflict model which synthesized the study findings and framed the NPOs’ approaches with three main considerations: use of AI and what it represents, organizational sustainability and the ability to contribute to client wellbeing success and wellbeing.
The Responsible AI Forum 2026 was funded by the European Union. More on alignAI.
