Shadow AI
IA de l'ombre
AI use that runs inside an organisation without having been declared, mapped or contracted. The founding observation is that employees keep using personal AI tools even when the official pilot fails: the work still goes through AI, by a path nobody has mapped, while leadership watches a pilot dashboard that measures none of it.
Converging orders of magnitude for 2026: the average enterprise runs around fourteen distinct AI tools, of which IT knows four or five; roughly a quarter of organisations have full visibility on actual use.
What this source does not establish
The volume figures come from converging secondary sources, not from a single primary study. Treat them as orders of magnitude.
What it means for an SME running AI
The gap between fourteen tools in use and five known is not a security statistic. It is the exact measure of what your decisions are currently based on.
Sources
- MIT NANDA, « The GenAI Divide », juillet 2025, pour le mécanisme
- Agrégats sectoriels 2026 pour les volumes
Related terms
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