Saying no takes the right people in the room

It’s worth stressing that employees aren’t doing anything wrong. They’re understandably excited and legitimately experimenting, usually with positive results. But too much of a good thing can hit the bottom line. This is why the right culture is just as important as spend controls. If employees know to be cost-aware, they’ll be cost-aware, innovating within set limits and expectations.

The same goes for shadow AI. Ideally, employees shouldn’t onboard their own tools or duplicate processes across platforms, as it both wastes resources and creates an attack surface. But in reality, two-thirds of office professionals at large companies say they’ve used AI tools at work they believed weren’t permitted. The waste is one thing, paying for capability you don’t need or already own, but unmanaged exposure is another. Consolidation does double duty: cutting the spend and reducing the surface.

At Paessler, we try to catch such problems early by uniting around an AI Center of Excellence (CoE). This cross-functional group brings together decision makers from IT, information security, human resources, finance, legal and operational excellence, meeting weekly to safely and strategically scale AI adoption.