The Approved AI Tool Nobody Opens
Why employees skip the AI tools IT approves, and what shadow IT can teach us.
His company rolled out an official AI tool.
IT was proud of it.
Yet almost everyone on his team still reaches for a different one.
I keep hearing versions of this story.
Approved tools sit unused.
The ones people actually open often never went through the official process.
This isn’t about which tool is better.
Different tools fit different tasks.
It’s about the gap between what gets approved and what actually gets used.
We’ve seen this before. A decade ago we called it shadow IT.
Today it’s happening again with AI, only now the barrier is much lower. A browser tab is often all it takes.
People skip the official tools because they’re slower, more limited, or simply don’t match the job. When policies get stricter, the behaviour doesn’t stop. It just goes underground.
I looked at the latest research from Deloitte, Okta, PagerDuty and Gallup. The pattern is consistent across companies and countries.
In the full piece I break down why the gap exists, what shadow IT already taught us, and practical ways to close it without killing productivity.
Curious, does your organisation actually know which AI tools people are using day to day?
