If you work for a company full time, you likely use artificial intelligence tools to streamline tasks, such as summarizing reports or analyzing data, without going through the filters of your IT department.
It should be noted that this habit is not an isolated case. According to the latest study by VML The Cocktail and Salesforce, 61% of employees who use AI do so without their company’s permission, supervision or knowledge.
The speed of penetration of this technology is unprecedented. And in just two years, chatbots have reached 76% of the population and have become a structural tool for 56% of workers.
It is mainly used to generate ideas, automate processes, as well as to manage large volumes of information. However, this integration occurs, in most cases, outside the companies.
Given the lack of official tools, the employee turns to the consumer market to solve his work needs. This causes adoption to advance much faster than the company’s ability to regulate it.
Users are one step ahead
This phenomenon, known as Shadow AI (Shadow AI), poses a critical risk to information security. By using external platforms without supervision, they expose sensitive data, internal strategies or customer information to public algorithms that do not guarantee privacy.
As pointed out elEconomistathe danger is twofold, since, on the one hand, information leaks to third-party servers occur. On the other hand, business decisions are beginning to be based on results offered by systems that have not been validated or audited by the organization.
Therefore, The lack of a framework for action turns productivity into a collective vulnerability. Underestimating the digital competence of the workforce is a mistake, says the report, which highlights that the user profile has become rapidly sophisticated.
You are no longer limited to making basic queries; More than a third of workers interact in an advanced way with generative AI. They refine the results, assign specific roles to the algorithm, and design instructions to get better answers.
It is worth mentioning a relevant fact, which is that 37% of users regularly configure or customize their artificial intelligence tools to adapt them to their workflow.
Given this, workers develop their own skills and methodologies in a self-taught way, creating knowledge capital that the company wastes by not integrating it into its formal processes.
A 24-month window of action
The study warns that companies have a critical window of between 18 and 24 months to act. It is the estimated period before uncontrolled usage patterns become consolidated and irreversible in the corporate culture.
If your company does not implement training policies and safe tools during this period, it will be extremely difficult to correct acquired habits. It not only perpetuates security risks, but also makes it difficult to standardize processes in the medium term.
The solution does not lie in prohibiting the use of technology, a measure that has proven ineffective, but in channeling it. Companies that transform this adoption into a regulated model will gain a real competitive advantage.
By making the use of AI official, the organization protects its security, validates its operations and retains talent that requires modern tools to maintain its professional competitiveness.