Shadow AI in Europe forces CISOs to govern unsanctioned workplace tools

Shadow AI is the practical front line of the race to integrate advanced models into everyday work. Long before AGI arrives, most organizations will first experience AI through a sprawl of plugins, copilots and SaaS features that quietly start doing work their policies never anticipated. The European Times piece captures a shift among CISOs and compliance leads: bans don’t work, so the job becomes building an internal AI stack that is attractive enough to compete with whatever staff can grab off the public internet.

In the AGI context, this has two implications. First, it accelerates the normalization of agentic workflows inside enterprises—meeting summarizers, code assistants, ticket triagers—which are the testing ground for future, more general agents. Second, Europe’s regulatory environment means these deployments are happening under a rising bar of accountability: audit logs, data‑handling rules, and alignment with the EU AI Act’s risk tiers. Vendors that can give CISOs real visibility and control over how embedded AI behaves will win disproportionate share in this market, and those control planes could later be reused for more powerful, quasi‑AGI systems.