Jun 28, 2026
AI may be proven to make us less intelligent, but that isn’t stopping the vast majority of people from using ChatGPT and similar applications at their office jobs — and neither are employer policies, apparently.
New research from PagerDuty — an AI operations platform — shows that far more staff are turning to Large Language Models and similar tools to complete their daily work than one might think. And, most are doing so when they know they shouldn’t be, and/or when dealing with private information.
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The firm conducted a survey of more than 1,200 office professionals at non-tech corporations and non-profits in the US, UK, Australia and Japan that generate or manage at least $500 million.
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What they found was an extremely high level of over-confidence in AI usage, with 72% of respondents asserting that they know more about AI and its potential applications to their role than managers creating workplace policies around the tech.
On top of that, among workers who use AI on the job, 66% are knowingly doing so in the face of rules that outright ban such programs. (This is despite about half, 48%, admitting that they’d faced formal consequences as a result.) This prohibited usage tends to be more popular at larger companies, the study suggests; at firms with 1,500 staffers or more. An even more substantial 72% divulged that they go against their employer’s wishes with their use of certain platforms.
Where consumer privacy may be breached
Nearly half of all who participated in the survey (45%) said they leverage AI to think for them, using it for “work-related advice or help making decisions,” while nearly the same amount, 43%, acknowledged “entering emails or other work-related correspondence into public AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini that aren’t part of their company’s internal systems.”
This includes, but is not limited to, feeding potentially sensitive or personal customer information, confidential financial data and/or company documents and trade secrets into AI programs.
And, this information is not guaranteed to remain secure, as these platforms are not private as people treat them.
OpenAI, for example, can and does use conversation data to continue to train and improve ChatGPT models, shaping how it will respond to future users. This is the standard default mode unless a user opts out in their settings or a different version of the tool (ChatGPT Enterprise or ChatGPT Business) is used.
As the OpenAI website states, “We retain certain data from your interactions with us… [to] help us better understand user needs and preferences.”
Granted, the company does take some steps to anonymize personal, identifying information before chats are used for training. But chats do not remain completely private. Even worse, users who send a private conversation to someone else with the LLM’s share feature — who are likely thinking only the recipient can access it — are risking exposure of any and all chat details, as the link is publicly accessible and indexable.
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The vulnerabilities go even further than many realize
AI programs can also access third-party apps on your device and the information contained therein, depending on how you use them. As London non-profit Privacy International explains, “a full picture that goes far beyond what you would consciously choose to share with any single company… that’s collected, processed and shared in ways you probably don’t expect or knowingly accept.”
It’s all outlined in the privacy policies of various AI tools, such as OpenAI’s, which reads “We collect personal data that you provide in the input to our services (“content”), including your prompts and other content you upload, such as files, images, audio and video and data from connected services. Some of our services allow you to interact with other users, such as post, comment or send messages, and we treat those interactions as Content, too.”
Generally, the public is advised to be extremely discerning about what it discloses to AI chatbots. But, when the person using the AI is someone else with access to your information, this can be impossible to gauge or control.
As AI adoption increases and workplaces become more comfortable with the tech, businesses big and small are slowly working out best practices to abide by. Based on the PagerDuty survey’s indication that staffers aren’t generally heeding complete vetoes on the tech, those workplaces that permit it within reasonable limits, that buy in to dedicated business iterations with more privacy and that encourage communication around its use will likely be the best off, as will their customers.
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Becky Robertson is a senior staff reporter at Moneywise and a lifelong writer. Along with more than a decade covering news at outlets like blogTO and Quill & Quire, she's attended writing residencies around the world. With 33 countries visited, she finds travel to be among her greatest inspirations.
