Do you use AI at work? And if you do, does your employer know about it?
A huge new study from Deloitte of 25,000 UK workers found that two-thirds have already used generative AI for work — and nearly a third of generative AI users say they’re using it without their employer’s knowledge.
Welcome to the world of ‘shadow AI’: workers bringing their own AI tools into the workplace, often without official approval, and using them to get their jobs done faster.
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A look at Reddit reveals what that can mean in practice. One Reddit user complained: “My coworker is secretly using ChatGPT to do 80% of his work. He’s getting praised for efficiency.” Their dilemma was simple: “Do I tell the bosses?”
Another Reddit user had the opposite problem after discovering just how much time AI could save them. “I’m a relative noob, so please don’t roast me, but I’ve just done about 2 weeks’ work in an hour. Do I tell my boss or keep it secret?”
One of the most popular responses to their predicament was equally revealing: “Remember, AI work is more detectable than you think. Spend time humanizing the output and adding your own texture, then shut up.”
It’s easy to see the attraction. If you’ve discovered a tool that lets you complete two weeks’ worth of work in an hour, why wouldn’t you use it? The more difficult question is whether you should tell anyone.
Shadow lands
Shadow AI doesn’t necessarily mean employees are doing anything malicious. In many cases, workers simply prefer using AI tools they’re already familiar with rather than whatever their company has provided — assuming it has provided anything at all.
But there’s an important difference between using your own favorite productivity app and using an unapproved AI chatbot.
As my colleague Craig Hale reported in June, a survey from PagerDuty found that 88% of workers had shared work-related information with public AI systems. Some 43% had uploaded emails or correspondence, 40% had shared meeting notes, 34% had entered customer information, and 31% had shared sensitive business information such as financial data or confidential company documents.
And that’s where shadow AI becomes more than an awkward conversation about whether somebody deserves credit for working faster. Employees can potentially be feeding sensitive company information into AI services their employers haven’t approved or secured.
But workers don’t necessarily trust their employers to make the right decisions about AI either. PagerDuty found that 72% of workers believed they understood AI better than their own tech teams, while 77% thought their company’s AI restrictions were limiting their professional development.
You can start to see why shadow AI is such a difficult problem for workplaces to navigate. An employee might simply see AI as a tool that helps them do their job faster, while colleagues could understandably wonder whether someone deserves the same credit for work largely produced by AI. For employers, there’s the added concern that sensitive company information could be finding its way into AI tools they haven’t approved or secured.
Who’s really in the wrong?
And let’s not forget how divisive AI can be. Many workers have a real aversion to using AI in any form whatsoever. One Reddit user asked: “How do I tell my boss who keeps telling me to use ChatGPT for simple tasks that I’m anti-AI?”
Workplace rules haven’t necessarily caught up with the speed at which employees have adopted AI, and there’s another remarkable number in Deloitte’s research that suggests just how far this has already gone.
According to the Deloitte survey, British workers are now spending an estimated £958 million of their own money every year on generative AI tools they use for work. That’s an extraordinary amount of money for employees to be spending on tools designed to make them better at jobs somebody else is paying them to do — particularly when almost a third aren’t telling their employers they’re using them.
But you can understand why. If you’ve just discovered a tool that lets you do two weeks’ work in an hour, telling your boss might result in them wondering what you’re going to do with the rest of the week.
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