Pre-Flight Checklist: Identify Risks (Post #3 of 20)
What's the risk no one's naming?
How did your confidential quarterly revenue numbers just end up on ChatGPT?
What is the secret data leak that’s hiding in plain sight?
The unmanaged risk this post focuses on is often overlooked until it’s too late. You’re building a framework to establish an Enterprise Super Highway for scalable AI, but before you achieve high-speed growth, we must pause and address the hidden structural defects that threaten your entire foundation: Shadow AI.
If I could make this scarier for you to get your attention, I would. Shadow AI is no joke and too often ignored. But since your children may be looking over your shoulder while you peruse Substack or LinkedIn, like mine often do, I offer you one of Disney’s finest, and most intense, examples of dark shadows manifesting as lurking threats.
Why talk about Shadow AI? My hypothesis aims to expose the potential fact that your employees (no, not all of them), in a frenzied zeal to appease your timelines and information requests, are taking your confidential and proprietary information and exporting them straight into unsecured third-party tools (e.g. chatbots, text summarizers, code generators) to produce a quick win. Did you say you needed a summary of the confidential quarterly report, by noon, but you don’t have internal AI tools set up? Guess where the confidential quarterly report was just shared to produce the summary?
Shadow AI creates the purest form of isolated success and it imposes fatal stress fractures across your governance framework.
This threat is existential and every use of Shadow AI violates your data policy and increases threats to your company.
This is a tricky one to solve. The challenge isn’t about avoidance stating, “We won’t use AI.” That’s just a surrender to obsolescence. The solution is about smart integration and having a plan. Focus on creating a framework with a governed and secure ecosystem where employees have access to the tools they need to innovate.
3 Steps for Unmanaged Threats.
You can’t govern what you can’t see.
Zero-tolerance discovery and enforcement.
Deploy a secure alternative, with a framework.
Create a Shadow AI Risk Score.
Test Flight - 48-hour Shadow Audit
It’s not a question of IF this is happening. The question is “what can we do about it?”
Engage. As a leadership team, identify the single most sensitive piece of information in your organization (e.g. proprietary financial data, draft patent or a critical client list).
Search. Ask your IT Security Team, better yet, your Security Red Team, to perform a search for the domain access of the top three consumer AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) within the last 30 days.
Score. The volume you see is now your Shadow AI Risk Score. The immediate corrective action is to create or refine the security policy, create a framework to bring in the tools needed, and communicate it to the teams.
Mission Debrief
Shadow AI is the enemy of scale. By eliminating it, you’re not just managing security, but you’re creating a clear, controlled boundary necessary to build the AI Adoption Framework for your Enterprise Super Highway.
Next Post: “Slop Happens.”
(If you’re not a Disney-lover or you’re easily scared, don’t watch the clip and just listen to the glorious rendition of composer Mussorgsky’s “Night On Bald Mountain” by Leopold Stokowski and The Philadelphia Orchestra, using an arrangement of the music by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.)