It's 2pm on a Tuesday. Someone in your organisation is quietly copying a document summary into ChatGPT. Another is using Claude to draft a presentation. A third is running a competitor analysis through an AI tool they found on their lunch break.
None of them have told anyone. None of them have been asked to stop. They just don't know if they're allowed. And honestly? Neither do you.
This is the AI reality in most Australian organisations right now. Not a bold enterprise strategy. Not a governance framework. Just individuals quietly solving their own problems and hoping nobody notices.
I call it shadow AI. And it's happening in your organisation. I'd stake 20 years on it.
Shadow AI: it's already lighting up across your organisation — just out of sight.
Why it's happening
Nobody told people what they could and couldn't do.
Can I paste this client proposal in? Is ChatGPT storing my conversations? Is my free account using my work data to train its model? Can IT see what I'm typing? If I use my personal account at work, who owns that data?
These are not unreasonable questions. They're exactly the right questions. And in most organisations, nobody has answered them.
So people do one of two things. They use AI anyway and quietly hope for the best. Or they don't use it at all and fall behind colleagues who are. Neither is good — and both are completely avoidable.
The account problem
Most employees don't have an organisational AI account. So they're using personal free accounts — their own ChatGPT, their own Claude — and running work documents through them. Client names. Internal financials. Sensitive HR conversations. Into a personal account on a free plan with no enterprise data protections in place.
Not because they're careless. Because nobody set up anything better, and nobody told them not to.
Meanwhile, in the boardroom
While that's playing out at the desk level, here's what's happening in the boardroom. Leaders are tracking every new AI release. Debating which platform to invest in. Building business cases. Booking conference tickets. The AI strategy deck has been through four rounds of revisions and is booked in for the next exec meeting.
Meanwhile, their people are already three months into using AI tools leadership don't even know exist.
The gap between where leadership thinks the organisation is on AI — and where it actually is — is the most expensive problem nobody's measuring.
What the organisations getting it right do differently
The organisations getting AI right aren't the ones with the best tools or the biggest budgets. They're the ones who had an honest conversation with their people first.
What can we use? What can't we? What are we worried about? What do you need from us?
That conversation — simple as it sounds — is the difference between an AI strategy that works and one that exists only in a PowerPoint on the executive's desktop.
Find out where you actually stand
If you don't know where your organisation actually stands, that's worth finding out. Not in a scary audit kind of way — in a genuine "let's understand our starting point" kind of way. Because right now, your people are making it up as they go. And they deserve better than that.
Use my free AI Change Readiness assessment to get a clear picture of your change risks.
