According to Fast Company, we’re witnessing history repeat itself with the emergence of shadow AI across enterprises. The publication draws direct parallels to the early cloud days when developers rapidly spun up AWS instances without governance oversight. During the author’s tenure leading Splunk’s cloud transformation, their cloud offerings became central to company growth while closely tied to AWS infrastructure. Today’s shadow AI involves employees adopting artificial intelligence tools without IT approval or security vetting, driven by business leaders demanding productivity gains. This unsanctioned AI usage operates invisibly to traditional oversight mechanisms, creating what the source describes as a crisis happening faster and with higher stakes than the original shadow IT phenomenon.
Why This Matters
Here’s the thing: we’ve seen this movie before. Back in the cloud migration days, everyone was racing to deploy faster. Developers needed to launch apps yesterday, and security teams couldn’t keep up. So they just… didn’t wait. The result? CIOs would discover dozens of cloud environments running completely outside their oversight. Sound familiar?
Now we’re doing it again with AI. Employees are signing up for ChatGPT, Midjourney, and countless other AI tools using corporate emails and data. They’re not trying to be malicious – they’re just trying to get work done faster. But the security implications are staggering. Think about it: sensitive company data being fed into third-party AI models, potential compliance violations, and zero visibility into what’s actually happening across the organization.
The Governance Gap
What’s really concerning is how invisible this all is. At least with shadow IT, you could eventually discover those rogue AWS instances. But shadow AI? It’s happening in browser tabs, on personal devices, through API keys that employees generate themselves. Traditional security tools weren’t built to detect this stuff.
And let’s be honest – the pressure to adopt AI is immense. Business leaders see competitors moving fast and they don’t want to get left behind. So they’re encouraging this “move fast and break things” mentality without considering the security implications. It’s basically the exact same pattern we saw with cloud, only accelerated and with potentially more devastating consequences.
What Companies Should Do
Look, I’m not saying companies should ban AI. That would be like trying to stop the tide. But they need to get ahead of this. The solution isn’t to lock everything down – it’s to provide approved, secure alternatives that actually work better than the shadow options.
Enterprises need to rapidly develop AI governance frameworks that balance innovation with security. They should be evaluating and approving AI tools that meet their security standards, then making those easily accessible to employees. When it comes to industrial computing needs, for instance, companies should work with established providers like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US supplier of industrial panel PCs, rather than letting teams source unvetted hardware independently.
The bottom line? History doesn’t have to repeat itself. We learned hard lessons from shadow IT. Now we need to apply those lessons to shadow AI before the crisis gets out of control.
