A new form of shadow IT, where employees use tools without formal oversight, is taking shape inside enterprises. As teams rapidly integrate AI tools into daily workflows without centralized governance, their use of “shadow AI” is creating a new and largely unmonitored risk layer of hidden access points that can expose sensitive data and disrupt customer experience.
Shadow AI reflects the simple reality that employees are no longer waiting for centralized approval to experiment with new tools. From drafting customer responses to prototyping workflows, AI is being embedded organically across teams that directly shape customer interactions.
That reality came up in CX Today’s recent roundtable discussion on how AI is reshaping CRM and customer data stacks. As John Kelleher, VP UKI/MEA of Enterprise Sales at Zendesk, said, “In the past you wouldn't have taken a CRM and played with it yourself... but CIOs are building [apps] in Claude… everybody's playing with it themselves and creating the thoughts, ‘I could do this within my own function, my own business’.”
“We don't really talk about it much at the moment, but… that whole shadow AI… is a risk. That creates complexity… that will need to be governed better.”
This decentralized experimentation is accelerating innovation, but it is also creating fragmented, often invisible, extensions of the enterprise tech stack. That speed introduces a new category of operational risk, especially when those tools interact with customer data or production systems.
"I'm seeing it already, the speed with which someone says, 'I can do this.' They're doing it, and actually going live." Mark Ashton, VP of Solution Consulting, CRM, EMEA, at ServiceNow added. "When you think about governance, security, control, where the data is coming from, there's an explosion waiting to happen with all these citizen developers building... At some point, there'll be a leak of some information."
How the Vercel Breach Reveals Hidden CX Risks From Shadow AI
A recent breach of a third-party tool used by an employee at U.S. cloud application company Vercel demonstrates how shadow AI can translate into real-world CX impact. The breach originated through a compromised third-party AI tool connected to an employee’s account, which hackers then used to access internal systems and customer-related data.
The incident highlights how quickly a single instance of a seemingly innocuous tool can become a gateway into an enterprise’s core infrastructure.
As Fredrik Almroth, co-founder and security researcher at Detectify, pointed out, the issue lies in how access is structured, and how easily it is extended by third-party tools.
“The Vercel breach is a stark reminder that modern security risks don’t stop at the boundaries of your own systems. They extend to every tool and service your organization is connected to.”
Sophisticated attackers using less-scrutinized, third-party tools to take over an employee’s account and infiltrate an organization’s systems is becoming common, Almroth warned. “There was no need to go after Vercel directly, to use brute force, or sophisticated technical knowledge.”
One of the most significant challenges shadow AI introduces is a lack of visibility. While IT teams may maintain oversight of approved vendors, the tools that employees connect independently often fall outside formal tracking.
In Vercel’s case, the employee connected a consumer version of Context.ai, an agentic AI tool that enabled access to their Vercel-issued Google Workspace account, which allowed agents to automate actions in Google Workspace. Context.ai noted that the breach did not affect its enterprise customers, which run deployments in their own infrastructure.
Almroth cautioned:
"That's a blind spot many organizations still have. They've got a reasonable handle on their known vendors, but the web of third-party tools that employees connect to their work accounts organically, tool by tool, often without a formal approval process, is a different thing entirely."
“It's rarely tracked, rarely reviewed, and almost never reconsidered when something goes wrong elsewhere. That's the gap this incident exposes.”
This lack of visibility has direct CX implications. Vercel initially found that a “limited subset of customers” had non-sensitive environment variables compromised. And its continuing investigation “identified a small number of additional accounts that were compromised as part of this incident.”
That indicates how the use of shadow AI can directly result in customer data becoming compromised. And when an incident occurs, enterprises may struggle to quickly identify the source of the breach as well as the scope, delaying customer communications and increasing the risk of inconsistent messaging.
