Analysis covering 7 million workers finds 71.7% of AI tools used in workplaces are high or critical risk, with 83.8% of enterprise data flowing to these unsecured platforms.
PALO ALTO, Calif., April 23, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Today, Cyberhaven released its “2025 AI Adoption and Risk Report” revealing alarming trends in workplace AI adoption and associated data security risks. The comprehensive analysis from Cyberhaven Labs draws on actual AI usage patterns of 7 million workers, providing an unprecedented view into the adoption patterns and security implications of AI in the corporate environment.
“Since the launch of ChatGPT, AI adoption has become one of the fastest growing workplace technologies in history. What began as individual experimentation with generative AI has rapidly evolved into essential business tools across organizations of all sizes—an unprecedented shift from novelty to necessity,” said Nishant Doshi, Chief Product and Development Officer, Cyberhaven. “Our research reveals that as this trend continues, organizations face unprecedented data security challenges and points to the fact that companies need to harness AI’s transformative potential while protecting their most valuable information assets.”
Click here to download the report.
Key findings:
01 AI usage in the workplace is growing exponentially
- The rate of AI usage frequency at work grew 4.6x in the past 12 months and an astonishing 61x over the past 24 months.
- AI adoption is highest among employees at tech companies (38.9% of employees). Employees using AI spread fastest in manufacturing (20x growth) and retail firms (24x growth).
02 Most AI tools in use in the workplace are high risk
- 71.7% of AI tools are high or critical risk, with 39.5% of AI tools inadvertently exposing user interaction/training data and 34.4% exposing user data.
- 83.8% of enterprise data going to AI is going to risky AI tools, instead of enterprise-ready tools (low and very low risk).
03 DeepSeek usage surged and then plateaued
- End user use of DeepSeek through deepseek.com surged in the 3 weeks after the R1 release, but soon plateaued ending the first 7 weeks at 672.8% growth.
- Use of DeepSeek in local application development by AI engineers peaked at 17.7% of AI developer usage in February 2025, second to Llama.
04 An increasing percentage of corporate data going to AI is sensitive
- 34.8% of corporate data employees put into AI tools is sensitive, up from 27.4% a year ago and 10.7% two years ago.
- The most common types of sensitive data employees put into AI are source code (18.7% of sensitive data), R&D materials (17.1%) and Sales and Marketing data (10.7%).
05 Software engineers are leveraging AI coding tools more than ever
- When companies roll out AI developer tools like Cursor or Cline, usage grows by 400% in the first four months after rollout.
- At the same time, when companies roll out AI developer tools usage of traditional IDEs like VS Code, Xcode, PyCharm declines by 23.7%.
06 AI adoption is highest among younger, mid-level employees
- Mid-level employees like analysts and specialists use AI tools 3.5 times as much as the next-nearest cohort (manager-level employees).
- Among software engineers, the highest AI usage is among mid-level software engineers, who use AI 189% more than their more junior counterparts.
About Cyberhaven
Cyberhaven is the AI-powered data security company revolutionizing how companies detect and stop the most critical threats to their most important data. Until now, data security products were limited to scanning data content and looking for specific user actions. Our AI technology analyzes billions of workflows to understand every piece of data within an organization, when it’s at risk, and takes action to protect it. It’s like nothing that’s come before and protects data like nothing else. For more information, visit https://www.cyberhaven.com/.
SOURCE Cyberhaven