Ivanti's survey of 3,900 employees across six countries has uncovered a stark disconnect in enterprise AI governance. While 85% of IT professionals assert that a named owner exists for every AI agent in their organization, only 42% can confirm that ownership is actually clear — a 43-point gap that underscores how existing oversight frameworks are failing to keep pace with rapid AI adoption.
The research also reveals that organizational leaders are nearly twice as likely to conceal their AI use compared to rank-and-file employees, at 42% versus 23%. Among executives who hide this activity, 52% say they do so to gain a "secret advantage," suggesting that deliberate shadow AI is being weaponized for competitive edge rather than resulting from simple oversight.
Sam Evans, CISO of Clearwater Analytics, framed the stakes bluntly: the $8.8 trillion in assets his firm's platform supports could be at risk if employees feed customer data into unmanaged AI engines. He told VentureBeat that the worst possible scenario would be unauthorized AI ingestion of sensitive client information — a threat many CISOs are still struggling to address.
Menlo Security CEO Bill Robbins described the challenge as nearly insurmountable for some institutions. He relayed a conversation with a CISO from a top-three U.S. bank who called shadow AI discovery "a bit of a fool's errand," arguing that AI is now embedded in every application and browser employees touch. That bank has pivoted from detection to containment as a more practical governance strategy.
One counterargument: some security leaders contend that aggressive shadow AI discovery efforts are themselves counterproductive, potentially alienating employees and slowing innovation. The scale of new AI applications — one source cites 50 new tools arriving daily — may simply overwhelm any attempt at centralized ownership tracking, making containment the only viable path forward.