Shadow IT (shadow AI)

Apps, AI tools and accounts that employees use or build for work without the IT team knowing or managing them.

With AI coding tools, people now build their own apps over a weekend: a quote calculator, a CRM export, a report generator. They usually solve a real problem, and they also hold company data behind a shared password or none, on a personal account. Banning them rarely works; the practical answer is to bring the useful ones under company login, backups and an owner.

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Related terms

SSO (single sign-on): Logging in once with a company account (Microsoft, Google, Okta) to use many apps, managed centrally by IT.
Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD): Microsoft’s cloud identity service behind Microsoft 365 logins, renamed from Azure Active Directory in 2023.
GDPR: The EU regulation on personal data: lawful basis, minimal data, user rights and breach reporting, for anyone handling EU residents’ data.

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Free tools

Business idea validatorTen rubrics, a fixed-rule verdict and three cheap experiments. Free.Software cost estimatorYour project among 125 real products, with honest ranges.Engagement configuratorPick the work and its size, see hours, price and start date.SPF, DKIM and DMARC checkerGrade any domain’s email DNS, with records to paste.BIMI checkerRecord, DMARC, SVG Tiny PS logo and VMC or CMC, with an inbox preview.App store readiness checkWhat your web app lacks for the stores, TWA or Capacitor, files to copy.Build or buy calculatorSaaS against your own app over 1, 3 or 5 years, with the payback month.Runbook generatorA RUNBOOK.md for a system only you know, in two minutes, in your browser.SLA calculatorMonthly fee, response times, a downtime budget and contract clauses.Local model or API?Does the model fit your hardware, how fast, what it costs against an API.OpenAPI to MCP toolsPaste an OpenAPI spec, get narrow MCP tools and a server skeleton.KSeF invoice validatorCheck an FA(3) invoice against the official schema in your browser.Quoting time calculatorHours spent turning inquiries into quotes, and when an agent pays off.Multi-tenant SaaS calculatorWhich multi-tenant model, the work per release and the weeks to get there.Quote DeskDrop a customer inquiry, get lines matched to your price list. Free.AI Visibility DeskDoes Claude recommend your brand? Weekly runs of your buyers’ questions, free.List DeskClean an email list in your browser: dead domains, disposable, typos, duplicates.Eval DeskTest cases for your AI prompt, run after every change: what regressed, what got fixed.Dashboard DeskA growth dashboard created in your PostHog, plus what your tracking is missing.Signature DeskOne email signature template for the whole team, as HTML for Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail.Phishing email checkerForward a suspicious email or upload the .eml file; three AI models and technical checks give a verdict.Email TestSend one email, check one-click unsubscribe, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and spam signals.Legacy rewrite estimateLines of code to function points, hours and cost, with and without agents.

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Przemysław Zalewski · 15+ years shipping software

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