Evaluating Intra-firm LLM Alignment Strategies in Business Contexts

TL;DR

This paper explores how firms can strategically align AI assistants' perspectives in business contexts to support ethical decision-making, cultural integrity, and organizational goals, highlighting three distinct alignment strategies.

Contribution

It introduces three novel intra-firm LLM alignment strategies—supportive, adversarial, and diverse—grounded in normative business ethics, to guide ethical AI deployment in organizations.

Findings

Supportive alignment reinforces the firm's mission and values.

Adversarial alignment tests ideas to uncover biases and assumptions.

Diverse alignment broadens moral perspectives by including multiple stakeholders.

Abstract

Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as AI Assistants in firms for support in cognitive tasks. These AI assistants carry embedded perspectives which influence factors across the firm including decision-making, collaboration, and organizational culture. This paper argues that firms must align the perspectives of these AI Assistants intentionally with their objectives and values, framing alignment as a strategic and ethical imperative crucial for maintaining control over firm culture and intra-firm moral norms. The paper highlights how AI perspectives arise from biases in training data and the fine-tuning objectives of developers, and discusses their impact and ethical significance, foregrounding ethical concerns like automation bias and reduced critical thinking. Drawing on normative business ethics, particularly non-reductionist views of professional relationships, three distinct alignment strategies are proposed: supportive (reinforcing the firm's mission), adversarial (stress-testing ideas), and diverse (broadening moral horizons by incorporating multiple stakeholder views). The ethical trade-offs of each strategy and their implications for manager-employee and employee-employee relationships are analyzed, alongside the potential to shape the culture and moral fabric of the firm.