London, June 11, 2026; The AI Values Institute today published its inaugural white paper, The AI Value Alignment Gap, introducing a new framework for understanding one of the most important and often overlooked challenges in artificial intelligence: the growing disconnect between the value AI creates, and the principles organisations claim to stand for.

As AI adoption accelerates across every sector, organisations are becoming increasingly focused on efficiency gains, cost reduction, productivity improvements and automation outcomes. Yet according to the report, many leaders remain unable to answer a more fundamental question: who is benefiting from the value AI creates, who may be disadvantaged by it, and whether those outcomes reflect the organisation’s stated values.

The report argues that while AI has triggered an unprecedented race for technological advantage, the conversation has become dominated by capability, governance and compliance. Far less attention has been given to the alignment between AI-generated value and human-centred outcomes.

“The challenge facing organisations is no longer whether AI can create value,” said Edosa Odaro, Founder of the AI Values Institute. “The challenge is understanding what kind of value is being created, who receives it, who bears the cost, and whether those outcomes are aligned with the values leaders ultimately stand for.”

The white paper introduces the concept of the AI Value Alignment Gap: the distance between an organisation’s declared values and the actual outcomes generated by its AI systems.

According to the report, organisations frequently measure AI success through operational metrics such as speed, efficiency and financial return while overlooking broader impacts on employees, customers, communities and society. The result is a growing risk that AI systems optimise for performance while unintentionally undermining trust, wellbeing, fairness, inclusion or long-term organisational resilience.

The report identifies several emerging challenges:

Organisations often measure AI outputs without measuring AI outcomes.
AI value is rarely distributed evenly across stakeholders.
Productivity gains can create unintended human, cultural and societal costs.
Governance frameworks focus heavily on risk and compliance while neglecting value creation and value distribution.
Many organisations lack a practical framework for aligning AI decisions with human-centred values.

The paper argues that the future leaders in AI will not necessarily be those who deploy AI fastest, but those who are able to connect technological capability with meaningful and sustainable human outcomes.

“AI does not create value in isolation,” added Odaro. “Value is experienced differently depending on where you sit within a system. What appears as efficiency for one stakeholder can feel like loss for another. The organisations that succeed will be those that understand these dynamics and actively design for shared value creation.”

The publication forms part of the AI Values Institute’s broader mission to help organisations move beyond AI adoption towards AI stewardship. Through research, education, practical frameworks and leadership engagement, the Institute aims to ensure AI delivers sustainable value that strengthens organisations without compromising the human values that underpin them.

The report concludes that closing the AI Value Alignment Gap will become a defining leadership challenge of the AI era, requiring organisations to move beyond questions of what AI can do and focus instead on what AI should do, for whom, and at what cost.

The full white paper, The AI Value Alignment Gap, is available to download here.

About the AI Values Institute

The AI Values Institute is a global mission dedicated to aligning AI value with human values. Through research, education, leadership engagement and practical frameworks, the Institute helps organisations ensure that AI delivers meaningful, measurable and sustainable value for people, businesses and society through an ecosystem of built on an academy, publications, podcast and an operating system focused on AI values in practice.

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