Your Team Is Already Using AI. You Just Don't Know Where.

Ask most PMO leaders whether their team uses AI, and you'll get a fairly confident answer , usually a name of an approved tool, maybe a rollout plan, a training schedule. Ask a more specific question — where exactly, on which decisions, using whose data, and the confidence tends to fade.

That gap has a name now. In a recent conversation on the Online PM Courses platform, project management commentators Yoshi Soornack and James Garner named it Shadow AI: the tools your team is already using informally, outside anything the PMO approved or even knows about, to help make real decisions on real projects.

I don't think this is a scandal. I think it's just what happens when a technology gets useful faster than an organization can build a policy around it.

This isn't a compliance footnote

A project coordinator pastes budget numbers into a chatbot to get a second opinion on a forecast. A scheduler asks an AI tool to sanity-check a resourcing plan. Nobody's trying to break a rule. They're trying to do their job a little faster, with a tool that happens to be extremely good at sounding confident.

That confidence is exactly the part that worries me. AI is very good at producing an answer that reads as authoritative whether or not it actually is. Soornack and Garner, in that same conversation, called this the illusion of intelligence, and I think that phrase is doing real work. The danger is not that AI gives wrong answers. It's that wrong answers and right ones arrive dressed identically.

What I think this actually calls for

Not a ban. I don't think that works, and I don't think it's the right instinct anyway, the people reaching for these tools are usually just trying to do good work faster. What it calls for is bringing the behavior into the light instead of pretending it isn't happening.

Salman Amir, a commenter writing from the PCI AI perspective on a project management blog, put it better than I could when this topic came up recently: AI capability in project management should be assessed at the decision level, not merely by whether someone can operate a tool. I think that reframing is the whole answer in one sentence. Don't just ask whether someone is allowed to use a chatbot. Ask what decision it's touching a budget line, a contractual date, a risk rating, and match your scrutiny to the stakes.

Amir's own list is worth repeating almost exactly as he wrote it: source-data controls, documented human review, accountability for approved outputs, and a clear escalation path when generated analysis conflicts with the baseline. The PMO can set that governance standard. But a qualified professional still has to remain accountable for any decision touching forecasts, resources, cost, or contractual commitments, the model doesn't get to hold that responsibility, no matter how confident it sounds.

The numbers say the stakes are real

This isn't a theoretical worry. Gartner's Predicts 2026 report on program and portfolio management puts a hard number on the underlying problem: only 14% of IT leaders are confident their data is properly governed for AI. For the other 86%, any AI-assisted decision “shadow or sanctioned” is being built on a foundation nobody has actually verified.

And the upside is just as real, which is exactly why I don't think the answer is to pull back. PMI's Pulse of the Profession data shows organizations using AI deliver 61% of projects on time against 47% for those that don't, and hit their ROI targets 64% of the time versus 52% for non-adopters. The gap runs in both directions at once — more capability, and more exposure, from the same tools.

Where I land on this

The PMO's job is not to have the fastest AI adoption. It's to make sure the organization can stand behind the decisions being made in its name. Shadow AI isn't a reason to slow down. It's a reason to finally say out loud what was always true. That a decision made with AI still needs someone qualified to own it.
I'd rather have that conversation now, while it's still a policy discussion, than later, when it's an incident report.

Bring it into the open. Match the scrutiny to the stakes. Someone still has to own the decision.

— Alex Rodov