Shadow AI doesn't show up in adoption surveys but it shows up eventually, usually at the worst possible time.
Our founder & Managing Director Samantha Bowie on the quieter risk behind Australia's AI boom, and a discoverability problem we are already familiar with.
Everyone's talking about AI adoption. What's getting less attention is off-the-record AI use - the tools quietly running across a business with no governance, no logging, and no one who could explain later exactly what they did.
Most businesses aren't sitting still on AI. They're experimenting - a team here, a tool there, a chatbot bolted onto a workflow because someone found it useful. In some cases, what they're not doing, is treating that experimentation as something that needs to be governed, logged, or documented.
That's fine, until it isn't.
At some point, someone will need to reconstruct what an AI tool actually did. A dispute. An investigation. A regulator asking questions. A breach response. And the organisation will discover that the shadow AI everyone was quietly using for six months left almost no trace, no version history, and no record of what data it touched, no way to establish what it was told or what it decided.
Good News!
Good news! This is a problem we already know how to think about. We've been asking these questions about data for years - who has access, what happened to it, can it be reconstructed later, under scrutiny, in a way that holds up.
Australia is building serious infrastructure around AI right now: a National AI Plan, a new Office of AI, an AI Safety Institute, a state Royal Commission specifically into AI. All of that is aimed at the big, structural questions.
But the smaller, quieter risk sits inside individual businesses, in the gap between "we're using AI" and "we could explain exactly how, if we had to."
That gap doesn't show up in adoption surveys. It shows up later, usually at the worst possible time.
If your organisation has shadow AI running somewhere, the question worth asking isn't just "is it working?." It's: if this ever needed to be reconstructed, could it be?
If this raises questions about what's happening inside your own organisation, we'd welcome the conversation. Get in touch.
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