If you’re already worried about your employees using tools you never approved for their day-to-day work, we have bad news, the issue is spreading. Now shadow AI in HR is rewriting the decisions made about your people, and we shouldn’t need to tell you how dangerous that is.  

A review gets written by a consumer chatbot because the official form takes too long to fill out. A team spins up a quick pulse survey in Google Forms since the enterprise tool takes forever to format. Payroll notes end up in private docs because someone couldn’t be bothered to log-in.  

Add AI to the mix and things get worse. Shadow AI in HR has surged as workers reach for whatever gives them the fastest answer. Research shows 71% of employees use unapproved AI tools, with 51% using them weekly and gaining roughly 7.75 hours back. More than half would use AI without approval, and 57% hide their usage. It’s not just your everyday employees. It’s everyone: managers, supervisors, team leaders, and hiring experts.  

Eventually, you end up with a workplace shaped by unsanctioned tools and bots, not actual people.  

Shadow AI in HR: What Shadow HR Really Looks Like

Shadow AI in HR isn’t an impending threat darkening your workplace doorway. It’s living already in the cracks of day-to-day work, and it’s affecting decisions in ways you might not realize.  

Shadow HR at the Edge: Managers & Local Teams

Plenty of managers keep their own systems running on the side. They’ve got spreadsheets for performance notes, pay changes, absence logs, and maybe even ideas on who should get a bonus. They’re working out schedules in WhatsApp, or relying on Microsoft Teams to keep track of who actually logged in each day. It’s all just easier.  

That’s particularly true now that AI is so helpful. Why bother writing up performance reviews yourself when your copilot can generate summaries of coaching conversations or performance discussions without anyone requesting it. Those summaries drift into email threads or personal storage, creating shadow AI in HR workflows without any kind of guardrails.  

Unofficial Engagement, Wellbeing & Feedback Systems

Engagement, wellbeing, and feedback systems are crucial to building culture (and competence) at work. We mention it in our guide to human capital management here.  

The problems happen when “official” strategies mutate into random events. HR launches a formal engagement survey twice a year, but teams want feedback faster. So they create their own pulse checks in Google Forms. Someone adds a “quick anonymous poll” in Slack. A wellbeing bot starts capturing mood scores without anyone reviewing how those responses are stored. You end up with two parallel datasets that rarely agree: the official one and the one employees actually respond to.

Read the full article here.