Big security risks come in small packages. While enterprise security teams focus on policing the proliferation of employees using ChatGPT and Claude for quick drafting tasks, a more urgent threat is posed by a handful of AI super-adopters who are quietly hardcoding unvetted tools into critical business operations.
According to new research published by Akamai, the top 5% of enterprise power users interact with AI models at 12 times the rate of the bottom 50% of the workforce. The findings, published in Akamai’s State of the Internet: Enterprise AI Usage Risk Report 2026, are based on real-world usage and telemetry data as well as research and threat analysis.
These AI super-adopters are creating a disproportionate security risk by expanding the use of shadow AI, increasing opportunities for data leakage, and introducing autonomous AI agents that operate within the enterprise but outside its established guardrails.
“Small groups of AI power users are casting outsized shadows across enterprise threat surfaces that are already riddled with dips and blind spots,” says Or Eshed, Vice President Enterprise Security Product & Engineering at Akamai. “While security teams are focused on trying to govern all employees’ access to big frontier LLMs, the cumulative long-tail shadow of dozens of smaller AI tools used by power users arguably poses a more significant security risk.”
