Shadow AI: The Invisible Risk Growing Inside Your Organization
Fortinet, Friday, April 10th, 2026
AI adoption is accelerating throughout the enterprise, and it is increasingly being used outside formal controls and approved workflows. Employees utilize publicly available generative AI (GenAI) tools to write code, summarize documents, analyze data, and automate routine tasks, often through browsers or personal accounts.
This shift introduces what is now called shadow AI. It's not a specific collection of tools but an environment in which AI is employed without oversight, governance, or visibility. It is rapidly becoming one of the most immediate and least understood risks in the enterprise.
This is one of the topics that will be addressed at the Fortinet AI Security Summit on April 21, where security leaders will examine how AI is reshaping risk across networks, applications, and data.