Shadow AI: How to Mitigate the Hidden Risks of Generative AI at Work
Jul 07, 2025
Sub: GenAI is here to stay. The organizations that thrive will be those that understand its risks, implement the right safeguards, and empower their employees to harness it safely and responsibly. For many people, generative AI (GenAI) began as personal experimentation in homes and on personal devices. Now, however, AI has become deeply ingrained in workplace habits, creating productivity gains, but also exposing organizations to significant security gaps. Sensitive company data, inadvertently or otherwise, regularly finds its way into public AI systems, leaving IT and cybersecurity leaders scrambling to respond. Once proprietary data is processed by a public AI tool, it may become part of the model's training data, serving other users down the line. For example, in March 2023, a multinational electronics manufacturer was reported to have experienced several incidents of employees entering confidential data, including product source code, into ChatGPT. Generative AI applications, su...