What is ‘BYOAI’ and why it’s a serious threat to your company

Months ago, I warned about “shadow AI”: employees moving faster than their companies, using AI without permission or training, while managers pretended not to notice. The right response was never prohibition but education and better governance. That was only the first signal of something bigger: BYOA or BYOAI, “bring your own algorithm” or “bring your own AI.” Now the trend is visible everywhere: workers are embedding their own agents into daily workflows, while companies scramble to bolt on controls after the fact. The comparison with the old BYOD is misleading — this is not about carrying a device, but about bringing in a cognitive layer that decides, infers, and learns alongside us. Now, recent evidence makes this gap even harder to ignore.

The data backs it up: Microsoft’s Work Trend