Nearly all businesses are in a race to utilize AI to optimize operations, reduce costs, and stay competitive. But a growing internal risk is largely overlooked: the unsanctioned, uncontrolled usage of public AI tools by employees, commonly called Shadow AI.
Why Is Shadow AI an Issue?
Shadow AI is rarely malicious. Employees, lacking approved tools, turn to public AI portals to solve pressing business problems, often unaware that sensitive data may be exposed or retained by external services. Once submitted, that data may be used to train third-party models, risking confidentiality, compliance, and accuracy. This is a more significant problem than companies may realize, confirmed in a recent Kompromise survey where 44% of IT leaders stated that sensitive data has leaked into public AI systems. According to that same survey, unvetted models have resulted in 46% of leaders experiencing false or inaccurate results, and 13% have experienced financial, customer, or reputational damage.
Every unauthorized use of AI is a potential data breach waiting to happen. These unsanctioned interactions are also governance blind spots that leave businesses in the dark about their compliance posture and the safety of intellectual property.
From Chaos to Control: Expedient Secure AI Gateway
Kids learning to ride bikes are prone to falling and crying. Remember the training wheels on our bicycles that kept us balanced? The Expedient Secure AI Gateway serves a similar purpose. Since AI is still new and inexperienced staff may misuse it, they need ‘AI training wheels’ – a straightforward and secure way to access powerful AI tools that doesn’t risk sensitive data or bypass IT policies.
The Secure AI Gateway is a managed, familiar chat interface that provides staff with access to multiple public and private AI models without requiring numerous subscriptions. Secure AI Gateway enables access controls aligned to your IT security and governance rules for data protection and compliance needs.
The Smart Model Router component prevents uncontrolled AI usage of public models and intelligently selects the optimal AI model for responses based on your policies regarding security, cost, and performance. This allows IT teams to maintain control and oversight of who accesses each AI system, how it is used, and the data transfer involved – without hindering your staff’s innovation or productivity.
This level of control means there is no friction for users; they can still perform their functions using the AI models that are IT-approved. For your IT and compliance teams, it’s a transformational experience.
Governance Without Gridlock
Businesses need protection from exposing sensitive data as well as blindly trusting AI results. With the Expedient Secure AI Gateway, businesses achieve:
- Private, Isolated Deployment for Maximum Security: The Secure AI Gateway is deployed as a dedicated Kubernetes container environment, ensuring data and AI operations remain fully under your control and isolated from other clients.
- Visibility and governance of uncontrolled AI usage. Like you would expect from any enterprise application, every chat query, file, and model interaction is logged, auditable, and aligned to your security and governance policies.
- Protection From Public AI Model Training: Access to leading public AI models is provided through enterprise API integrations that use different, business-grade terms of service – ensuring model vendors have no rights to train on or retain your data.
- Simplified AI adoption. ‘Training wheels’ mean your staff and teams can start using AI immediately with no infrastructure delays or expertise required beyond what they already know from using public models.
- Development of a robust AI strategy. As usage grows, businesses can securely integrate private models and agentic workflows into the solution.
- Turning AI Risk into a Competitive Advantage
Just as significant of a risk as falling behind because your employees aren’t effectively using AI is their using AI without your awareness. This represents a governance challenge that can lead to compliance issues and necessitate increased effort to regulate.
Expedient Secure AI Gateway gives you control while enabling your employees with popular LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity and others. This unlocks the best of both worlds – security and optionality. It is a non-invasive solution that keeps innovation in motion while protecting the intellectual property that defines your business, moving you from ‘wild west’ AI usage to a carefully sculpted city built for growth, innovation, and competitive differentiation.
The journey toward safe and productive AI begins with setting up the proper guardrails to guide and protect users instead of blocking their access to increased productivity.
Regain Control. Protect Your Company Data. Empower Your Teams.
Discover how Expedient Secure AI Gateway helps you harness AI safely and confidently. Learn more today.
