Shadow AI invades the workplace, up 4x in the last year

AI + ML

Shadow AI invades the workplace, up 4x in the last year

Employers increasingly blind to unauthorized AI use and where their staff are sending proprietary files

You know about shadow IT. Get ready for the shadow AI surge.Employees using unauthorized personal accounts to access GenAI tools are emerging as a growing insider-risk concern for organizations, new research shows. That means workers who have access to sensitive material could be plugging it into their AI platform of choice more frequently, leaving their organization none the wiser.Of the 45 percent of all professionals using AI in the workplace regularly, 67 percent of those were accessing the platforms using personal accounts that were not authorized by their IT teams, data from Verizon’s annual data breach investigations report (DBIR) [PDF] showed.

Verizon said that the proportion of users accessing AI through personal accounts now represents a fourfold increase in non-malicious insider actions detected across this year’s dataset of more than 22,000 breaches globally.