Shadow AI: When Your Employees Use ChatGPT Behind Your Back
Shadow AI: When Your Employees Use ChatGPT Behind Your Back
Your employees are using AI at work. The question is: do you know which tools they're using?
Wysor solves this. We provide enterprise AI with contractual privacy guarantees - your data is never stored, never trained on, and never shared.
The Problem Is Growing Fast
According to a 2025 Bitkom survey of 604 German companies:
| Metric | 2024 | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Companies reporting widespread private AI use | 4% | 8% | +100% |
| Companies reporting isolated cases | 13% | 17% | +31% |
| Companies confident no private AI is used | 37% | 29% | -22% |
Meanwhile, only 26% of companies provide employees with AI tools. The gap is widening.
When your HR manager pastes salary data into ChatGPT, that data potentially enters their training pipeline. When your sales team uploads customer lists, that information leaves your control. When your legal team summarizes contracts with personal AI accounts, confidential terms flow to external servers.
With Wysor, none of that happens. Your data is processed and discarded - never stored, never trained on.
The Real Risks
Data Protection: Free AI subscriptions train on your data. Customer information, HR records, trade secrets - all become training data for someone else's model. Under GDPR, you're responsible.
Compliance: Financial services data processed outside approved systems. Healthcare information leaving compliant environments. Legal documents shared with unvetted third parties.
No Visibility: When employees use personal accounts, you don't know what data was shared or what outputs were generated.
Wysor gives you enterprise AI with full GDPR compliance and EU data residency. Your data stays yours.
Banning AI Doesn't Work
Some companies try to prohibit AI entirely. It never works.
Employees who need AI to stay productive will find workarounds. They'll use their phones. They'll copy-paste through personal devices. They'll sign up for free accounts with their personal email. The shadow just gets darker, and you lose all visibility into what's happening with your data.
The reality is that AI makes people more productive. Your competitors are using it. Your employees know this. When you ban AI without providing an alternative, you're not stopping AI use - you're just pushing it underground.
The real solution is giving employees what they need: capable AI tools with real privacy guarantees.
Wysor was built for exactly this.
- No data storage - Conversations are processed and discarded
- No training on your data - Nothing enters any training pipeline
- No data sharing - We don't sell, share, or monetize information
- Full GDPR compliance - EU data residency
We run on GLM-4.7 - frontier-class performance that employees won't need to supplement with personal subscriptions.
Stop Shadow AI
The fix is simple: give employees capable AI tools with real privacy guarantees.
Get in touch - we'll show you how to bring AI out of the shadows.
Sources: Bitkom survey of 604 German companies, July-August 2025; SP Data analysis of Shadow AI in enterprise HR