4 AI Security Gaps Hiding in Your Organization

Just a couple of years ago, generative artificial intelligence was still largely a novel technology. Fast-forward to today, and many organizations are beginning to adopt AI agents that can not only access corporate resources but.

As breach frequency and costs continue to rise, organizations are opening the aperture on the types of investments that make sense for improving security posture. Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs are a great example, with protections that are built in rather than bolted on. Here are a few standout features that speak to security.

Here are four common problems we’ve seen lurking in the environments of SentinelOne’s Prompt Security customers.

1. Lack of visibility: Industry is waking up to the problem of “shadow AI,” where employees bring unauthorized AI tools into their workflows. Most business leaders, however, have no idea which tools, or how many, their employees are using. We do. According to real-world scanning data from Prompt Security deployments, employees at small organizations are using 45 distinct AI websites monthly. For mid-market organizations, this number rises to 72 distinct AI websites per month. This doesn’t even account for the use of desktop apps, AI code assistants and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. In short: Most organizations don’t even have visibility into the AI workflows they need to secure. SentinelOne’s Prompt Security suite provides dynamic AI discovery across the enterprise, offering a starting point for AI governance.

2. Data leakage in AI prompts: Here’s another alarming statistic, straight from Prompt Security deployments in the field: 1.6% of all AI user prompts contain a policy violation of some sort. Most often, these violations involve some sort of data exposure, including personally identifiable information, credentials or confidential corporate data. Although the percentage is small, it can still create large problems. If employees average even 10 AI prompts per day in a 1,000-person organization, that’s thousands of risky prompts every month.

3. Insufficient governance for agentic AI: Agentic AI tools can connect to enterprise systems, retrieve information, call application programming interfaces and complete multistep workflows. That creates enormous potential for productivity, but it also greatly expands the attack surface. Organizations need to know who is using agentic AIwhich those agents are using to communicate with one another and what level of access those agents have. Without that visibility, an AI agent could have broader access than intended. Prompt for Agentic AI Security is designed to help organizations govern and enforce policies on agentic systems, with automated risk analysis and granular controls at the interaction level.

4. Gaps in homegrown AI applications: Recently, one of the world’s largest companies made news when hackers were able to trick its user-facing chatbot into bypassing multifactor authentication and providing access to high-profile accounts. This incident illustrates just how much risk homegrown AI tools may present if organizations do not have the proper guardrails in place. Prompt for Homegrown AI Applications addresses this by protecting AI-powered applications at runtime, preventing prompt injection, jailbreaks and other AI-specific attacks before they cause damage. Prompt for AI Red Teaming complements this with continuous testing that simulates real-world AI attacks tailored to each specific application as models get updated or drift. Together, they secure the AI apps your organization builds, from pre-production testing to runtime enforcement.

AI adoption is still moving quickly, and organizations must carefully balance access with security. If leaders lock tools down, they risk hampering productivity or incentivizing insecure work-arounds. And if organizations allow unfettered AI usage, they risk losing visibility, exposing sensitive data, allowing unmanaged AI agents to run wild and shipping vulnerable applications.

The only answer is to give employees safe ways to use AI productively. And to do that, organizations must adopt security solutions designed to uncover and address the unique vulnerabilities of the AI era.