The Visibility Deficit Series

The Cost of Shadow AI

Your budget increased, but your visibility didn’t. Find out what 400 IT and cybersecurity decision-makers and 3.4 billion generative AI requests say about the gap between AI governance spending and AI governance in practice.

Security budgets are growing, and AI security and governance is first in line for the next dollar. Even so, 46.1% of organizations have had an employee connect an unapproved AI tool to Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or SSO, and 20.1% say one of those connections caused a security incident.

This report combines a CensusWide survey of IT and cybersecurity professionals across the US and Canada with DNSFilter resolver data from more than 43,000 North American organizations. It shows where your governance budget is going, what it isn’t catching, and why the number of AI tools your team thinks employees use is far lower than what’s actually on the network.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why AI security and governance is getting the next dollar ahead of cloud security
• How often employees connect AI tools to corporate data before IT is notified, or without IT ever finding out
• Why more than 60% of teams can’t confirm that their existing security tools are properly configured and monitored
• How self-reported AI usage compares with the AI services that actually resolve on the network
• Three questions to answer before your next AI governance investment