The research, conducted by Censuswide across Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK, probed AI use in organisations with 50 to 250 employees. Its central finding is that shadow AI is no longer a junior employee phenomenon. It has become habitual at every level, including the top.
The numbers carry some irony. Thirty-one percent of leaders already believe untracked AI use is a real business risk — yet nearly half of those same leaders are doing it themselves. The gap between recognising the governance problem and changing personal behaviour appears to be substantial.
The research points to cultural barriers rather than technical ones. Thirty-five percent of leaders say they lack technical confidence with AI; an equal share do not fully trust AI outputs; and 33 percent worry that visible AI use would undermine their authority. These are not the objections of people resisting AI. They are the objections of people trying to use it without adequate support or shared norms.
Mark Williams, COO at Sharp UK, said the next phase of AI adoption is about confidence and governance, not access. "Businesses must create the frameworks and shared understanding of what good AI use looks like to enable them to lead by example," he said.
The agentic AI wave adds urgency. As organisations move from pilot-stage chatbots to systems that independently handle multi-step tasks — case handling, onboarding, investigations — the audit trail matters more. AI use that stays invisible is harder to govern, harder to measure for ROI, and harder to correct when outputs are wrong.
Sharp's pitch is that governance frameworks need to normalise AI use before they can control it: if leaders use AI openly and explain how, it changes habits faster than any policy document. Whether European SMEs will move on that prescription in the near term is a separate question. The research at least puts data behind what many IT leaders have sensed for some time — shadow AI is not a junior problem any more.
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