On 20 May 2026, alignAI doctoral candidate Julia Li from the IEAI at the Technical University of Munich, supervised by 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 organisations (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-centred organisations which influence the behaviour of NPOs around LLMs.

By bringing sector-specific context into previously explored values such as accuracy and trust, this work explored how organisational and personal values relate to the preferences and behaviours of key stakeholders. Using interview data from NPOs primarily in the greater Toronto area, the study spotlighted how organisation-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 synthesised the study findings and framed the NPOs’ approaches with three main considerations: use of AI and what it represents, organisational sustainability and the ability to contribute to client wellbeing success and wellbeing.