Akto Recognized as an Shadow AI Discovery Vendor in Gartner™’s "Shadow AI Is Creating Opportunity for Product Leaders” Report

Shadow AI has moved from a fringe IT concern to a board-level exposure. Employees adopt unsanctioned tools faster than security teams can govern them, and proprietary data leaves the perimeter before anyone files a ticket.

In its report Shadow AI Is Creating Opportunity for Product Leaders, Gartner™ reframes that liability as leverage. Unmanaged AI bleeds intellectual property and breaks compliance, but the product leaders who embed AI security into their products turn exposure into a defensible differentiator instead of shipping AI as one more productivity feature.

We are proud that Akto is named in the report as an AI discovery tool product leaders can use for continuous monitoring and increased visibility.

What the report covers

The report maps how AI democratization opened blind spots for product teams and CPOs, quantifies the exposure, and prescribes the near-term moves leaders need to govern AI instead of being governed by it. The message is direct: visibility into shadow AI is now table stakes, and the ability to discover, isolate, and validate AI usage is becoming a competitive advantage.

Where Akto fits

Akto is listed among the specific AI discovery tools product leaders can adopt to scan internal environments and translate technical findings into executive-level metrics. That maps to exactly what Akto was built to do: eliminate shadow AI blind spots, enforce data loss prevention guardrails, and build enterprise-grade AI governance.

The blind spots the report identified

Three forces are widening the gap between AI adoption and AI governance.

Shadow IT is surging. More than 60% of enterprise employees, including product managers and business users, now run unsanctioned AI tools without oversight. Internal scans cited in the report found nearly one in four product features calling external LLMs that IT and security never approved.

Unmanaged agents leak data. 35% of organizations have already detected AI agents reaching external servers and slipping past the perimeter, exposing customer PII and sensitive product logs to third-party models.

Development outruns review. AI assistants and "vibe coding" ship features in days, not quarters. Code reaches production faster than any manual review cadence can keep up with.

The numbers underline the gap: 79% of employees misuse approved public generative AI tools, 69% use prohibited tools outright, and 52% are building custom AI solutions with no security review.

What the report recommends, and how Akto delivers it

The report's three recommendations map cleanly onto the Akto platform.

Discover and quantify shadow AI. Embed automated discovery that surfaces shadow AI and report unsanctioned AI usage in terms that executives can take to the board.

Akto discovers shadow AI across the organization, attributes usage down to the employee and tool, and gives leaders the access and governance controls they need to move from fragmented experimentation to governed adoption.

Enforce data boundaries and centralize agents. Route agentic workflows through centralized gateways, restrict agents to governed action catalogs, and apply least-privilege access and automatic PII redaction.

Akto secures your AI agents, enforces what each agent can access, applies redaction, and validates that sensitive data never crosses a boundary it should not.

Deploy AI to check AI. Weave AI-driven code reviews and security agents directly into the SDLC so defensive posture keeps pace with AI-accelerated delivery, shifting security left.

Akto run continuous adversarial probes across LLM, agentic, and MCP attack surfaces, backed by a library of 4,000+ probes mapped to the OWASP Top 10 frameworks, so vulnerabilities surface inside the pipeline rather than in production.

Shadow AI is not retreating. The product leaders who win are the ones who turn unmanaged exposure into governed, validated, defensible AI adoption.

Gartner™, Shadow AI Is Creating Opportunity for Product Leaders, Marissa Schmidt, Brandon Medford, et al., 18 May 2026.

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