Definition

What is shadow AI?

Shadow AI is AI tooling employees adopt without IT or finance approval — personal ChatGPT accounts, unsanctioned Copilot seats, API keys on corporate cards. It creates untracked spend, security exposure, and duplicate tools. Spendassay detects it from SSO and OAuth grants plus corporate-card spend, then prices the overlap and unsanctioned seats as findings.

Every figure Spendassay publishes about shadow ai carries a proof level saying how much guessing sits behind it, and opens to show the rows it was computed from. The full method is on the methodology page.