Shadow AI a major concern for enterprise IT

A new report reveals that nearly 80 percent of IT leaders say their organization has experienced negative outcomes from employee use of generative AI, including false or inaccurate results from queries (46 percent) and leaking of sensitive data into AI (44 percent).

Notably the survey of 200 US IT directors and executives from Komprise shows that 13 percent say that these poor outcomes have also resulted in financial, customer or reputational damage.

In addition, 79 percent of IT leaders report that their organization has experienced negative outcomes from sending corporate data to AI, including PII data leakage and inaccurate or false results.

To help combat the downside of shadow AI, most (75 percent) say they plan to use data management technologies to address the risks, followed closely by AI discovery and monitoring tools (74 percent).

The biggest challenge in preparing unstructured data for AI is finding and moving the right data to locations for AI ingestion (54 percent) followed by a lack of visibility into data across data storage to identify risks (40 percent). 96.5 percent say they are classifying and tagging unstructured data for AI, with a mix of manual and automated methods used for doing so.

Supporting AI initiatives is named the top priority for IT infrastructure (68 percent), followed by 16 percent saying it is equally as important as cost optimization, cybersecurity and core IT upgrades.

"As enterprises are starting to get real about AI as part of their business strategy, the cracks are starting to show," says Krishna Subramanian, COO and co-founder of Komprise. "With most reporting that they have experienced negative and even damaging consequences from using corporate data with AI, it’s time to create the right AI data governance strategy. Unstructured data management will play a central role by giving users automated tools for data classification, sensitive data management, data workflows and AI data ingestion."

You can get the full report from the Komprise site.

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