New research from Snowflake has found that 67 per cent of workers in Australia and New Zealand are already using AI tools their employer has not approved. That is the highest rate of any region covered in the study, which surveyed 2,050 business and technology leaders across 10 countries. Globally, the figure sits at 57 per cent.
Workers were not secretive about why. The main reasons given were slow internal approval processes (cited by 49 per cent of ANZ respondents), gaps in the capabilities of the tools their business had officially signed off on (48 per cent), and the speed advantages of unapproved tools (36 per cent). Put simply, the tools their employer provides are not keeping up with what they need to do their jobs. So they found others.
The same study found that 74 per cent of ANZ organisations report AI has created more roles than it has cut. 50 per cent also reported job losses, so the picture is not straightforward. But the job creation finding, while significant, should not distract from the operational reality the shadow AI data reveals. A workforce that is solving its own AI problems without organisational support is a workforce operating without governance, without data security oversight, and without the consistency that comes from shared tools and training.
For Australian business owners, the takeaway is not that employees are doing something wrong. They are doing something entirely rational. They have identified that AI helps them work better and they have found the tools to do it. The question is whether their employer has been part of that journey or absent from it. Organisations that have taken the time to understand what their people actually need from AI, and built their strategy around that, are in a very different position from those that handed out software licences and called it an AI strategy.
The businesses that get AI right are not the ones with the most tools. They are the ones that brought their people into the conversation before the tools arrived. When 67 per cent of your workforce is already working around you, that conversation is overdue.
Via Snowflake Research Reveals AI Driven Job Creation Outpaces Job Loss Across Australia and New Zealand
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