Netskope details AI Index on enterprise AI adoption
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Netskope released the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Index, a telemetry-based benchmark that reports real-time enterprise AI usage and unmanaged tool access, giving security and IT leaders empirical visibility into adoption patterns and data exposure risks.
Research overview
The AI Index is built from aggregated, anonymized telemetry collected across the Netskope platform and is updated regularly to reflect current enterprise activity rather than retrospective estimates.
The dataset captures prompts, instances of shadow AI application access, and uploads to Generative AI (GenAI) services, producing a behavioral view of how employees interact with AI tools in production environments.
Key findings
The Index reports that weekly enterprise AI use more than doubled year over year, rising from 19% to 44% of employees, while the average number of AI apps accessed per enterprise increased to 60 from 35 a year earlier.
The data shows that 12% of enterprise users bypass approved tools weekly, and that known managed offerings such as Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini coexist with personal ChatGPT accounts, unmanaged Claude instances, and many purpose-built apps.
Threat analysis
The report highlights that unmanaged AI interactions create potential data exposure events when intellectual property, customer information, or regulated data are sent to external services.
It also notes a migration from general-purpose assistants toward specialized AI tools that are more likely to touch regulated data and core workflows, increasing compliance and governance concerns.
Operational impact
The Index provides temporal visibility, showing that enterprise AI adoption continues to grow and the composition of tools in use is shifting toward coding assistants, data-analysis tools, and vertical-specific applications.
This shift changes the central operational question from whether employees are using AI to which AI tools are accessing sensitive systems and data.
Product update
The benchmarking capability segments AI activity by industry vertical, region, and company size so security teams can compare their managed versus unmanaged AI ratios with peer organizations.
Those comparisons are presented to help security and IT leaders assess alignment of approved toolsets with peer norms and to identify gaps in visibility or control.
Leadership perspective
The blog notes that regulatory attention to AI data handling is advancing in the EU, multiple U.S. states, and in APAC, while cyber insurance assessments are beginning to consider AI usage patterns.
Survey results cited from Cybersecurity Insiders indicate 38% of organizations wished governance had preceded AI adoption at scale and 25% wished they had invested in visibility controls sooner.
The Netskope AI Index is presented as a current, peer-contextualized source of observed enterprise AI activity to inform governance, risk assessment, and executive briefings. This “Blog Signals brief” is a fact-based summary of the vendor blog.
Blog post, originally published by Ray Canzanese at netskope.com.