VentureBeat Jun 15, 05:19 PM
85% of IT teams claim every AI agent is under control. Only 42% actually know who owns them. Organizational leaders are nearly twice as likely to hide their AI use compared to all other employees, at 42% versus 23%, according to new Ivanti research surveying 3,900 employees across six countries. Among leaders who conceal that usage, 52% say they do it for a "secret advantage." The same research found 85% of IT professionals claim a named owner exists for every AI agent. Only 42% say ownership is actually clear — a 43-point gap that no governance framework was designed to close.
Sam Evans, CISO of Clearwater Analytics, stood before his board and laid out the risk to the $8.8 trillion in assets his firm's platform supports. "The worst possible thing would be one of our employees taking customer data and putting it into an AI engine that we don't manage," Evans told VentureBeat. He brought a solution, not just a problem. Many CISOs VentureBeat interviewed did not.
Menlo Security CEO Bill Robbins relayed a conversation with a Top 3 U.S. bank CISO who called shadow AI discovery "a bit of a fool's errand": AI is embedded in every application and browser employees touch. The bank governs from containment, not discovery.
The scale justifies that posture. "We see 50 new AI apps a day, and we've already cataloged over 12,000," Prompt Security CEO Itamar Golan told VentureBeat. "Around 40% of these default to training on any data you feed them, meaning your intellectual property can become part of their models." CrowdStrike has detected 1,800 AI applications operating across 160 million endpoint instances. Those are vendor-reported numbers from proprietary telemetry. No independent party can verify them. The directional signal matters more than the exact count.
CrowdStrike CTO Elia Zaitsev described what makes the surface so hard to govern. "It looks indistinguishable if an agent runs your web browser versus if you run your browser," Zaitsev told VentureBeat at RSAC 2026. "Observing actual kinetic actions is a structured, solvable problem. Intent is not." The shadow AI surface is no longer a list security teams can maintain. It is an environment they have to assume.
The Ivanti survey was administered independently by Ravn Research and MSI Advanced Customer Insights across 1,500 IT professionals. Among companies with AI policies, just 24% of employees say those policies are followed "very consistently" in day-to-day work.
Kayne McGladrey, IEEE senior member, told VentureBeat why that governance gap persists. "Anything that seems to have a cybersecurity flavor is generally put into the cybersecurity risk category, which is a complete fiction. They should be focused on business risks, because if it doesn't affect the business, like a financial loss, then nobody's going to pay attention to it, and they will not budget it appropriately, nor will they adequately put in controls to prevent it," McGladrey told VentureBeat previously.
Brokerage partners at major consulting firms shared over Signal that they build shadow AI applications in Google Colab and s