There is a conversation happening in your company right now that you are not part of. It is not happening in the boardroom, and it is not in your official Slack channels. It is happening in the browser tabs of your employees, between them and a dozen different AI models you never officially approved.
We call it Shadow IT when employees buy unauthorized software. Shadow AI is fundamentally different, and the operational risk is significantly higher.
Over the last few months, I have been auditing the operational workflows of several mid-sized enterprises. The goal was to map out standard operating procedures (SOPs) and find efficiency bottlenecks. What I found instead was that the official SOPs were essentially dead documents. The actual work was being done through a hidden web of personal AI accounts.
The marketing team was pasting draft product strategies into a free LLM to generate copy. The junior developers were dumping proprietary code snippets into unauthorized AI assistants to debug faster. The finance team was using unsanctioned PDF analyzers to summarize vendor contracts.
When I confronted the teams about this, the response was universal: "But it makes us so much faster."
