AI is spreading through workplaces faster than any other technology in recent memory. Every day, employees connect AI technologies to enterprise systems, often without permission or oversight from IT security teams. The result is what experts call shadow AI – a growing web of tools and integrations that access company data unmonitored.
Dr.Tal Shapira, Co founder and CTO at SaaS security and AI governance solution provider Reco, says this invisible sprawl could become one of the biggest threats facing organisations today, especially since the current speed of AI adoption has outpaced enterprise safeguards.
“We went from ‘AI is coming’ to ‘AI is everywhere’ in about 18 months. The problem is that governance frameworks simply haven’t caught up,” Shapira said.
The invisible risk inside company systems
Shapira said most corporate security systems were designed for an older world where everything stayed behind firewalls and network borders. Shadow AI breaks that model because it works from the inside, hidden in the company’s own tools.
Many modern AI tools connect straight into everyday SaaS platforms like Salesforce, Slack, or Google Workspace. While that is not a risk in itself, AI often does this through permissions and plug-ins that stay active after installation. Those ‘quiet’ links can keep giving AI systems access to company data, even after the person who set them up stops using them or leaves the organisation. That’s a big shadow AI problem.
Shapira said: “The deeper issue is that these tools are embedding themselves into the company’s infrastructure, sometimes for months or years without detection.”
The new class of risk is especially difficult to track as many AI systems are probabilistic. Instead of executing clear commands, AI makes predictions based on patterns, so their actions can change from one situation to the next, making them harder to review and control.
When AI goes rogue
The damage from shadow AI is already evident in real-world incidents. Reco recently worked with a Fortune 100 financial firm that believed its systems were secure and compliant. In days of deploying Reco’s monitoring, the company uncovered more than 1,000 unauthorised third-party integrations in its Salesforce and Microsoft 365 environments – over half of them powered by AI.
One integration, a transcription tool connected to Zoom, had been recording every customer call, including pricing discussions and confidential feedback. “They were unknowingly training a third-party model on their most sensitive data,” Shapira noted. “There was no contract, no understanding of how that data was being stored or used.”
In another case, an employee linked ChatGPT directly to Salesforce, allowing the AI to generate hundreds of internal reports in hours. That might sound efficient, but it also exposed customer information and sales forecasts to an external AI system.
How Reco detects the undetected
Reco’s platform is built to give companies…
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