Shadow AI refers to the use of artificial intelligence tools by employees without the approval or knowledge of the IT department or security managers. It is a variant of the broader Shadow IT phenomenon, but focused on generative AI applications, conversational assistants, or cloud services that workers adopt on their own initiative to streamline their tasks.
Its relevance lies in the risks it introduces, often invisibly to the organization:
- Data leakage: confidential information entered into external tools that may reuse it to train models.
- Regulatory non-compliance: violation of the GDPR or other data protection regulations.
- Lack of traceability: decisions or content generated without quality control or logging.
A common example is an employee pasting snippets of a contract or source code into a public chatbot to summarize or debug it. The response from companies is usually not a total ban, but rather the establishment of clear usage policies and the provision of secure corporate alternatives that meet those real needs.