Shadow AI Is The New Shadow IT

Let me be real with you for a second. There have been a couple of shifts in AI for business that people aren't talking about.

When ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and even platforms like my own Symbient.ai hit the scene, every business wanted to "add AI" to something. Boardrooms were buzzing. Budgets were allocated. And then... a lot of those initiatives quietly fizzled out with nothing measurable to show for it.

So the pendulum swung. The first shift. Instead of big org-level AI bets, the focus shifted to giving every employee their own personal AI assistant. Makes sense, right?

Then AI agents, such as OpenClaw, showed up and promised to take it even further - accessing your email, your browser, your CRM, your dashboards - doing the work for your people, running autonomously on your employees' laptops.

Cool in theory. But here's where it gets messy.

What happens to an employee's AI agents when they leave? The tool might be portable. The access, credentials, and context they built up? Not so much. Now you've got fragmented automation scattered across individuals instead of owned by the organization.

And from a security standpoint? IT teams are already stretched managing humans on the network. Now imagine hundreds of AI agents running in the background - touching systems, using personal credentials, keeping devices on overnight.

Shadow IT just became Shadow AI. And it's unsustainable.

The companies quietly winning right now aren't chasing every AI trend, such as allowing individuals to run their own independent AI agents, despite what "AI experts" will lead you to believe. Instead, they're making the second shift - a shift back to the way it was before. They're finally asking the question:

"Is this AI initiative building durable, transferable, and secure capability for our organization - or just temporary productivity for a few individuals?"

The ones staying relevant are moving back toward centralized, governed AI. Role-based access. Secure integrations. Organization-owned intelligence.

Not because AI agents are bad. But because ungoverned AI agents are a liability.

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The hype cycles will keep coming. But be cautious which ones you jump on. Some are more destructive than what they may seem at the surface.