In speaking with IT leaders recently, I keep hearing the same thing. Employees are using AI, with or without IT’s blessing.

The problem: They’re using it in risky ways. For example:

• They’re pasting customer lists into ChatGPT to summarize them.
• They’re feeding contracts into public chatbots to analyze them.
• They’re asking AI tools to review company data they exported to a spreadsheet.

Here’s the part that should worry you. Studies keep finding the same thing, including IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report: Employees routinely ignore the AI tools their company actually paid for. Why? Because the sanctioned tools are slower, harder to get into, or don’t do what they need. So, they reach for the public ones instead.

In short, Shadow AI is becoming the default.

I talk to IT leaders who feel like they’re in an impossible spot. They’re trying to manage a workforce that’s already using AI, on tools they didn’t approve, against data they’re responsible for, in ways their auditors and privacy team can’t see. Policy memos don’t fix that.

The only thing that fixes it is giving people a sanctioned path that’s easier than the rogue one. IT needs a way to deliver sanctioned AI that’s easy for the users…without giving up control.

That’s exactly what’s coming next in m-Power.

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Coming in May: Build AI Agents in Your Environment, Governed by Your Own IT TeamRead More »