Hear No AI, See No AI, Speak No AI: Silence Isn’t a Strategy

In my consulting and executive coaching work, I continue to hear the same confessions over and over in meeting rooms and one-to-ones: “I’ve been using AI at work, but I’m not really supposed to.”

It’s always said with a mix of hesitation and relief. Hesitation, because they know it’s not authorised. Relief, because finally they have a space to discuss and explore this.

I usually say, “Ahh… so you’re using Shadow AI.” That usually gets a puzzled look, so I explain it’s the industry term for this kind of quiet, parallel use of AI inside organisations. Knowing there’s already a name for it seems to validate their experience and make them realise it’s not just them, it’s happening everywhere. That moment says a lot about why we need to do better.

These conversations are telling. They reveal not just how individuals and teams are already using AI, but how few organisations have the strategy or structures in place to support them. Across industries including healthcare, education, logistics, and finance, mid-to-large businesses are defaulting to two familiar responses: indifference or prohibition.

Both leave staff on their own, and both create risks the organisation can no longer afford to ignore.

Looking Without Seeing

In many boardrooms, leadership acknowledges that AI is likely being used somewhere in the business, but they are unsure how they want to engage with it. This isn’t wilful ignorance so much as paralysis. Faced with evolving regulations and guidelines, legacy enterprise technology, and no clear strategy or roadmap, they hesitate. Competing priorities only reinforce their instinct to wait for certainty that never comes.

What’s often missed here is that doing nothing is still a choice. It allows risk to build, unnoticed and unmanaged. Many organisations pour resources into cyber security, monitoring firewalls and endpoints, yet overlook the quiet back door they’ve left wide open through unmanaged AI use. I’ve seen leadership teams surprised to discover how deeply AI has already embedded itself into daily workflows, from staff feeding business and customer information into public platforms to analysts using free tools to speed up reporting. These aren’t isolated incidents. They are signals of a broader reality, where staff are under pressure to deliver more with less and will use whatever tools they can to keep up.

This is also a moment of opportunity. Leaders and organisations who choose to look away not only fail to mitigate risk, they fail to learn and to take up potential untapped business opportunities. The insights already being generated within their teams could inform smarter strategies, more realistic policies, and competitive advantage. Instead, they are ignored, leaving staff feeling unseen and unsupported, and leaving the organisation further exposed.

This posture also sends a powerful message, even if unintentional, that leadership is more comfortable with unmanaged risk than with managed change. That perception corrodes confidence.

Not Speaking, Not Learning

Then there’s the culture itself. What happens when organisations avoid the conversation altogether? Staff stop talking about their use of AI. They keep their clever, small-scale wins to themselves, even though those could be scaled and celebrated. They also cover their mistakes and missteps, denying the organisation the chance to learn what doesn’t work before it becomes a bigger problem. When these mistakes stay hidden, they quietly grow and risk surfacing later as reputational damage the organisation can’t easily contain.

When silence sets in, innovation retreats underground and lessons, both good and bad, are lost.

I’ve spoken with employees who say they’ve discovered ways to save hours a week with generative AI, but they won’t tell their manager because they’re afraid of being told off or, worse, told to stop. Others describe using personal devices and free accounts to get around website bans, copying and pasting confidential data into Gen AI tools because it’s faster than waiting for approvals they know will never come. These aren’t malicious actors. They are employees who see the pain points the business often overlooks and are using these tools to improve the customer experience and resolve issues faster.

But without a culture of openness, those experiments can’t be harnessed. Successes stay invisible, and failures are quietly corrected, hopefully, instead of being shared and learned from. As one client recently told me, “We could all be working smarter already, but no one feels they can openly talk about their use cases, so everyone just stays quiet.”

That quietness isn’t just about efficiency lost. It’s about organisational learning and innovation lost. Every hidden success and every covered-up mistake are a missed opportunity to build competence, resilience, and collective confidence. It also leaves me wondering which organisations will be bold enough to step up and lead the way in this space.

Literacy as Governance

These postures of looking away, hearing but not responding, and silencing rather than engaging may feel safer, better, or even smarter in the short term. But they leave organisations exposed to data breaches, privacy failures, reputational harm, and an ever-widening gap between policy and practice.

Most employees want to act in good faith. But when no systems exist to support them to be their best, even well-intentioned people end up outside the rules.

This is the new frontier of governance. And governance starts with literacy. Boards should be asking: do we have at least have a light-touch roadmap? Are AI risks and opportunities explicitly discussed at committee level? Do staff know where we’re heading? Are there clear points of contact, with champions in each function to offer advice? Do people feel safe to share what they’re trying, and what they’ve learned? And is there a feedback loop to surface, act and celebrate those lessons more broadly?

Governance also needs to recognise that compliance and silence are not enough. Simply leaving people unsure of what they can and can’t do, or relying on vague prohibitions, creates more risk than it resolves. Competence, curiosity, and clarity matter just as much. Those only come when organisations invest in building the literacy of their people, not just telling them what not to do but equipping them to do things well.

Leaders and organisations now face a choice. Equip your people with the clarity, tools, and culture they need and deserve, or leave them to navigate alone, taking your risks with them.

Silence is no longer a strategy. It’s time to stop looking away, start listening, and lead the conversation about what comes next before someone else decides it for you and your organisation. Be bold enough to shape your organisation’s future before it’s shaped for you.

If your organisation is ready to start building that path through foundational workshops, strategic planning, and governance support, I’d love to be part of that journey. Reach out via info@dialecticalconsulting.com.au or contact me via linkedIn.