Every time a major piece of technology hits the market, the panic sets in. Right now, artificial intelligence is the current boogeyman. If you read the most sensational headlines, you might think we are only a few weeks away from robots taking over your operations and locking you out of your own building.
Every business owner eventually runs into the exact same wall. You have a finite number of employees, eight hours in a standard workday, and a growing list of tasks that never seems to shrink. When productivity stalls, profitability drops right alongside it. It is rarely because your team is lazy or unmotivated. In most cases, it is because they are spending their valuable hours fighting against cumbersome, outdated processes.
There is a major trap that business owners fall into when they start investing in automation tools. The immediate reaction is often to look at the balance sheet and calculate how much payroll can be slashed next quarter. Looking at automation purely through the lens of headcount reduction is a massive mistake that misses the entire point of what technology is supposed to do for a business.
There is a massive amount of pressure to adopt artificial intelligence right now. Many business owners are convinced they are falling behind the curve and are ready to spend thousands of dollars on dedicated platforms simply because they feel they have to adopt them or go extinct.
Is AI good for productivity? Of course… but, like most things, there are two sides to consider. Since artificial intelligence is so good for productivity, many employees (perhaps even some of yours) are turning to public AI tools without authorization or oversight, exposing summarized meetings, written code, entire spreadsheets, and other proprietary and sensitive data to a public database. In short, they’re using a specific form of shadow IT… shadow AI.