Employees across government and contractor environments are pasting sensitive documents into ChatGPT and other consumer AI tools every day, often without IT's knowledge and without policies in place to govern it. This session breaks down the real risks of unauthorized AI use, including data exposure, compliance blind spots, and third-party provider exposure, and gives attendees a practical governance starting point: how to inventory shadow AI use, build sanctioned alternatives, and prepare an incident response plan before they need one.

This session is presented jointly by an artificial intelligence researcher who studies how organizations and end users adopt and misuse AI tools in everyday practice, and a cybersecurity executive and author whose work on AI governance and oversight of intelligent systems informs how leaders should be rethinking risk in the age of autonomous technologies. Together, they bridge the human and behavioral side of AI adoption with the governance and risk frameworks needed to manage it, giving attendees both the why behind shadow AI and the how to bring it under control.