What Are the Main Shadow AI Risks?

Determine what business, personal, confidential, privileged, or regulated information enters the tool and how the provider stores, uses, shares, or protects it. Review account type, contract, data settings, integrations, training use, retention, location, subprocessors, access, and deletion capabilities. The scope should be explicit enough that two reviewers can reach a comparable view using the same facts, while still recording uncertainty that requires further investigation.

Retain supplier sources, configuration evidence, data-flow validation, unresolved terms, risk acceptance, and required usage restrictions. Useful evidence identifies the tool or feature, user group, business purpose, data involved, outputs consumed, process dependency, approval status, and remediation decision. Discovery signals are leads, not verdicts; they need validation with the people who understand the workflow and its business context.

Identify how outputs influence analysis, code, content, customer communication, commitments, eligibility, safety, employment, or other consequential work. Evaluate error, fabrication, bias, manipulation, provenance, intellectual-property, and insufficient human-review scenarios in context. The scope should be explicit enough that two reviewers can reach a comparable view using the same facts, while still recording uncertainty that requires further investigation.

Document representative outputs, validation procedures, reviewer competence, error handling, escalation, and decisions that prohibit unsupported uses. Useful evidence identifies the tool or feature, user group, business purpose, data involved, outputs consumed, process dependency, approval status, and remediation decision. Discovery signals are leads, not verdicts; they need validation with the people who understand the workflow and its business context.

Examine hidden integrations, automated actions, privileged access, continuity dependency, vendor lock-in, undocumented workflows, and absent incident routes. Consider whether the use bypasses procurement, security, privacy, legal, records, change, resilience, or regulatory analysis. The scope should be explicit enough that two reviewers can reach a comparable view using the same facts, while still recording uncertainty that requires further investigation.

The risk record should connect scenarios to controls, owners, residual exposure, exceptions, monitoring, and a time-bound treatment decision. Useful evidence identifies the tool or feature, user group, business purpose, data involved, outputs consumed, process dependency, approval status, and remediation decision. Discovery signals are leads, not verdicts; they need validation with the people who understand the workflow and its business context.