Glossary
Shadow IT
What is shadow IT?
Shadow IT is software, devices or cloud services that people use for work without the IT department’s knowledge or approval. Shadow AI is the AI form of it.
Why it matters
Shadow IT usually points to a need the official tools don’t meet. Shadow AI raises the stakes, because people paste company data into AI tools and act on what those tools produce.
Example
A sales team tracks deals in a spreadsheet on a personal cloud drive because the CRM is too slow to update from a phone.