There was a time when “Shadow IT” meant someone bringing their own laptop to work. Or signing up for Dropbox without telling anyone. Or circumventing the firewall to access Skype. The term conjured images of frustrated tech leaders, rogue innovators, and IT departments scrambling to maintain order. But that world feels quaint now.
Today, Shadow IT looks very different. It’s not just unsanctioned tools or unmanaged devices. It’s people using ChatGPT to build business apps. It’s entire departments plugging operational gaps with autonomous agents, bypassing traditional procurement and governance processes altogether. The nature of “unofficial” technology has changed along with; the risks, the opportunities, and the strategic response required.
In the past, Shadow IT was reactive: employees solving urgent problems with whatever tools they could find. The risk was manageable, often a question of policy enforcement or access control. Now, it’s generative. Employees are building solutions that weren’t previously possible without dedicated development teams. An operations lead can spin up a data-scraping agent to auto-generate weekly performance summaries. A product marketer can prototype a user journey with natural language prompts and a handful of APIs. And it’s all happening without tickets, sign-offs, or architectural review.
We saw a glimpse of this when the likes of Power Platform gave rise to citizen developers. But this is a whole new level.
This shift is subtle but profound. The arrival of agentic AI; tools that not only process information but take actions on our behalf, has brought Shadow IT into a new era. We’re no longer dealing with static tools. We’re dealing with dynamic, intelligent, increasingly autonomous systems.
For IT and digital leaders, this evolution poses a strategic dilemma.
On one hand, it threatens control. These agentic tools can access sensitive data, trigger automation, and integrate with critical systems. If misused, or more likely misunderstood, they can introduce serious risks: from compliance breaches to operational chaos.
On the other hand, they unlock creativity. Employees are finding better, faster ways to get things done. They’re not waiting for capability, they’re creating it. And in many cases, the results are genuinely valuable.
There’s also a third dimension: cost. The more that decentralised teams build their own agents, the harder it becomes to track ROI, consolidate spend, or ensure technical alignment. You may find yourself with three different teams building similar automations with three different platforms, each incurring its own set of maintenance, support, and security concerns.
The old model of governance—based on blocking, restricting, or punishing Shadow IT no longer works. It assumes a level of visibility and control that no longer exists. Worse, it risks alienating the very people who are driving innovation on the ground.
A more effective approach starts with partnership, not prohibition.
At Dootrix, we believe the future of work is agentic. That means enabling individuals and teams to deploy intelligent, goal-directed systems that work on their behalf. But that future will not be built exclusively by centralised IT. It will be co-created by everyone in the organisation. Guided by strategic intent and empowered by accessible technology.
Shadow IT, in its current form, is a signal not a threat. It tells us where our teams are ahead of us. Where they’re solving problems we haven’t addressed. Where the bottlenecks are. And where the opportunities lie.
Our job is not to chase it into the shadows, but to bring it into the light.