Shadow AI
AI tools people use at work that the organisation has not approved or does not know about.
Shadow AI is the use of AI tools that the organisation has not sanctioned: a free chat assistant for work, a plugin that reads company documents, a browser extension that summarises pages.
It is the normal state of affairs, because the tools are easy to adopt and the approval process is not. The problem is not moral, it is operational: data can be leaving through a channel nobody has secured, and when something breaks there is no owner and no record of what happened.
The useful response is not prohibition, which mostly produces concealment. It is making the approved path easier than the unapproved one, and making the rules legible enough that people can tell which is which.
Related terms
AI Governance
The rules your organisation sets for how AI is used, and who is accountable for them.
Compliance
Meeting the legal rules that apply to what you built, in the place you built it.
Data Privacy
The rules about whose personal data you may hold, and what you must do with it.
AI Adoption
The organisational work of getting people to actually use a tool that works.
PII
Information that identifies a person, directly or through a combination of details.
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