The Shadow AI Problem: Why Your Company's LLM Usage Is Bigger Than You Think

In the early 2010s, cloud services became accessible enough that individual employees and small teams could sign up for business software without any involvement from central IT. The resulting pattern was given a name: Shadow IT. Software was being used in a shadow, out of sight of the people formally responsible for it. Shadow AI is the same pattern, repeated. An employee who needs to summarize a long document pastes it into a public chatbot. A product manager drafting requirements does the sam