How The Shadow AI Economy Is Hurting You
You can’t fix what you refuse to see.
Every headline this week screams that 95% of corporate AI projects are failing. MIT drops a study, and suddenly everyone is ready to declare AI “overhyped.”
But the devil is in the details. And those details are fascinating.
Yes, companies are burning millions on failed pilots. But the report also reveals something bigger: 90% of employees have gone rogue. They’re paying out of pocket for tools like ChatGPT and Claude to get their jobs done.
This is the fastest technology adoption in corporate history—and it’s happening entirely outside official channels.
That should fascinate you. And terrify you.
The productivity gains happening outside formal work systems are only the surface issue. The real nightmare is data privacy: the larger the company, the bigger the risk.
The study bluntly explains why 95% of pilots fail: corporate AI systems “do not retain feedback, adapt to context, or improve over time.” The missing ingredient isn’t human—it’s that the AI itself can’t learn.
Fixing this requires a wholesale rethink of work and leadership. Building self-improving flows from atomic tasks. Empowering even juniors to become managers—of AI agents, not people. And resisting the corporate addiction to micromanagement and visibility theater.
Large companies will struggle to turn the battleship, but small, nimble teams can make the pivot today (even inside large orgs).
