Introducing SailPoint Shadow AI Remediation: Finding the AI your security team can’t see

Every company is racing to adopt AI.

Few realize they already have.

Whether your organization is actively deploying AI or still exploring it, your employees are already experimenting with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to accelerate research, write code, analyze data, and automate tasks.

The productivity upside is undeniable.

But there’s a problem: most of this activity happens outside the view of security and identity teams.

This emerging category of risk has a name: Shadow AI.

The statistics are eye-opening: 81% of employees admit to using unapproved AI tools at work. Even more concerning, 75% of them are sharing sensitive company or customer data with those tools, and 57% are intentionally hiding this usage from their employers.

This isn't just a trend; it’s a massive, unmanaged risk. At its core, Shadow AI is more than a tooling problem, it’s an identity problem.

Today, we at SailPoint are officially closing that gap with the announcement of SailPoint Shadow AI Remediation.

Moving from policy-time to real-time

Traditional governance often relies on "policy-time"—rules written in a handbook that are difficult to enforce in the heat of the moment. But AI moves at the speed of a keystroke. To secure the AI agent explosion, organizations need to shift to a more dynamic, real-time approach.

SailPoint Shadow AI Remediation (SAIR) is a core component of the SailPoint Real-Time AI Governance and Security Framework. It is designed to help organizations discover, monitor, and remediate the unauthorized use of AI tools as it happens, ensuring that innovation doesn't come at the expense of security.

How it works: discovery, remediation, and zero friction

Shadow AI Remediation delivers comprehensive governance outcomes within a single platform. Here is how it can help your organization stay secure:

• Eliminate blind spots with real-time visibility: Gain an immediate understanding of how employees interact with consumer AI tools. SAIR allows you to track interaction frequency and monitor document uploads to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in real-time. This eliminates the "visibility gap" that often leads to accidental data exposure.
• Active remediation and guardrails: This isn't just about watching; it’s about acting. SAIR allows you to actively prevent data leaks by enforcing secure guardrails. You can automatically block unauthorized sensitive file uploads, redirect users to secure corporate AI alternatives, or even prompt users to justify their business use case before they proceed.
• Centralized oversight and compliance: By natively integrating with SailPoint Identity Security Cloud, SAIR unifies identity governance and security. It enriches identity profiles with AI tool usage data, enabling dynamic risk scoring and more intelligent privilege security based on real-world behavioral patterns.
• Effortless deployment with zero friction: Security works best when it doesn't get in the way. SAIR requires zero networking or infrastructure updates. It is a lightweight browser extension that can be easily deployed via standard device management tools like Intune or JAMF. For the employee, the experience is invisible... unless a specific policy violation occurs.

Internal validation: We are “Customer Zero”

At SailPoint, we don’t just build security tools; we use them. We have already deployed SAIR internally to thousands of our own employees with zero friction and without a single support ticket. By serving as "Customer Zero," we’ve been able to gain immediate visibility into application usage that was previously invisible, ensuring our own path to AI innovation is a safe one.

A foundation of identity
What makes SAIR unique is its place within our broader vision for identity-first security. By using our "Identity DNA" to solve the Shadow AI problem, we are helping our customers tackle one of the biggest challenges in the modern workplace: the rise of AI and machine risks.

Whether you are managing human identities, machine identities, or the rising tide of AI agents, SailPoint provides a single, unified lens to secure them all. We are entering a new era of digital transformation where AI is the engine. With SailPoint Shadow AI Remediation, you can finally put your foot on the gas with confidence.

Want to learn more?

• Check out the SailPoint Shadow AI Remediation page.
• Join us for our upcoming “Mission AI: The adaptive identity advantage” webinar series to see SAIR in action.