By Dipesh Ranjan, Sr. Vice President, Cyble
The use of Artificial Intelligence in today’s working environments has increased almost exponentially. As more and more workers use AI to assist them in their day to day work routine by allowing for the speeding up of tasks (creating content/finding images/analyzing data) ultimately leading to increased productivity. However along with this increased use of AI, there has also been an emergence of a hidden threat within companies, referred to as Shadow AI; much like Shadow IT, it is the use of AI tools and applications without knowledge or consent from the company’s IT/Security teams by employees; they may be utilising an unauthorized AI tool with good intentions and while doing so, exposes the company to potentially high risk of breaches of Intellectual Property and/or breach of Data Security rules.
Understanding Why Shadow AI is Growing
The rapid advancement in Generative AI Technology has made it easy for workers to access and begin using Generative AI as part of their regular work processes by executing functions that include development of marketing material, summarizing documents, performing HR functions, producing budgets/forecasts, supporting product development and many others. The problem arises when workers upload sensitive information about their company into these generative systems; events such as uploading confidential business strategies or confidential Source Code of products could potentially allow an outside party access to sensitive corporate data and lead to significant data leakage.
How Do AI Leaks Occur?
Most of the time, AI leaks are an accident and are not intentional. Most of the time AI leaks occur from simple day-to-day workplace activities. Employees may copy and paste confidential code into a Chatbot to assist with debugging it or may upload a confidential document into an AI tool for summarization of the content. Once the company’s sensitive data leaves the controlled environment of the company, there is very little ability to track that data. In addition, given that many individual employees are each using different AI tools without knowledge of the fact, a company could end up inadvertently creating a fragmented network of untracked data.
The Price for Exposing Your Intellectual Property
The most valuable asset a company may have is considered to be its IP (intellectual property). If a company experiences the leaking of a product, design, proprietary algorithm, research finding, strategic plan, etc., their competitive advantage will begin to erode, thereby negatively affecting their ability to generate future revenuesFurthermore, if data pertaining to regulatory violations, regard compliant with contractual agreements, experiencing loss of reputation, and/or incurring legal liabilities due to unauthorized use of AI create potential exposure to customers and/or partners.
Developing A Secure AI Infrastructure
Addressing Shadow AI will require more than restricting access to AI. Organizations need to develop defined AI Governance Policy, provide approved and enterprise-level AI solutions, or provide training to employees on how to properly use AI.
For example, security teams will need to implement data classification tools, monitoring systems, and access control that minimizes the probability of sharing sensitive data through unauthorized means. Additionally, corporate cultural change is as equally important as it relates to the employee’s understanding of both the value and risk associated with ai usage.
As organisations embed AI technologies deeper into their enterprises, it will be critical for them to balance the adoption of innovation while also providing and adhering to good governance practices. Organizations that proactively identify and mitigate adverse ai exposures (shadow ai) now will likely be in a better position to protect their intellectual property and maintain trust in their organizations as the world moves toward an ai-generated economy.