Using an AI chatbot, assistant, or browser to speed up your work is tempting, but doing it without your employer’s knowledge can put sensitive data at risk. You’re swamped, so you paste a long email thread into a free chatbot and ask for a summary. It works, it saves an hour, and nobody notices. But the thread may contain customer details or confidential plans you’ve just shared with an outside service. If your employer hasn’t approved that tool or how you’re using it, that’s shadow AI. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) defines shadow AI as: “the use of AI technology which isn’t captured in an organisation’s approved systems and processes.” A Microsoft study published in 2025 found that 71% of UK employees surveyed said they had used AI tools at work their employer hadn’t…