Your employees already use AI. The real question is whose AI.
Most of your people already use AI at work, often without telling you. Three questions that change when the AI is yours instead of borrowed.
Entrepreneur ran a piece this week with a blunt headline: “Your Employees Are Already Using AI.” The KPMG research behind it is hard to wave off.
KPMG’s 2025 American Worker Survey found that 87% of U.S. workers use AI at least weekly, and 51% use it daily. KPMG and the University of Melbourne surveyed more than 48,000 people in 47 countries. Among employees who use AI, 66% rely on its output without checking it, 57% admit hiding their AI use at work, and almost half have used it in ways that break company policy.
Many of your people are not waiting for permission. Public tools are fast and easy to reach. As the Entrepreneur piece puts it:
“Write an AI policy, email it to everyone, ask employees to acknowledge it, and the problem appears solved. Except it isn’t.”
The article offers six questions every owner should be able to answer: who is using AI, what for, how, what company or customer data goes into it, who checks the output, and who owns the result.
Three questions that change when the AI is yours
- Where does our data go? With a public tool, wherever the tool sends it. With a private system hosted on your own server, it stays on a server you control.
- Who checks the output? In a system built around approval, by default nothing goes out until someone on your side approves it. Checking becomes part of the work, not a hope.
- Who decides what runs on its own? You do. Which steps run alone and which wait for a person is set per workflow, by you.
Give them something better than a ban
Banning AI is hard to enforce when so many people are already using it. A better answer is to give them something that’s built for your business, knows your rules, and keeps you in control.
That’s what we build at Forjance: private AI staff, custom-built. A small team of AI systems hosted privately on your own server and trained on how your company works. Not a chatbot. A team. We built it to run our own company first, and we offer it to other companies because it holds up.
If your employees are already using AI, you have a choice: let it happen in the shadows, or give them a system that’s yours. Forged, not found.
Sources
- Entrepreneur, “Your Employees Are Already Using AI” (October 13, 2026)
- KPMG, “The American Worker in the Age of AI” (2025)
- KPMG and the University of Melbourne, “Trust, attitudes and use of AI: A global study 2025”