Employees are now using more than 3,400 AI apps at work — most outside IT visibility. According to Zscaler, that surge is creating a major shadow AI compliance & security challenge, as sensitive company data flows into tools that many IT teams cannot fully monitor.
As Jay Chaudhry, CEO and Founder of Zscaler, said on the company’s recent earnings call:
“Organizations are rapidly adopting AI to drive productivity and innovation, but doing so is creating new vulnerabilities, significantly expanding the attack surface and increasing cyber threats in scale, sophistication, and speed — recasting AI from a productivity engine into a dangerous security threat.”
The scale behind that warning can't be ignored. Zscaler said AI application usage across its customers has expanded to more than 3,400 apps, a quadrupling over the last 12 months. Meanwhile, data transfers to AI applications exceeded 18,000 terabytes in 2025.
The company also reported that enterprise AI usage rose 91% year over year, while data transfers to AI and machine learning applications climbed 93%.
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Securing Uncontrolled AI Usage at Scale
Zscaler is positioning its new AI Protect tools as a response to this shift, arguing that enterprise AI security must now focus as much on employee behavior and governance as on traditional cyber defense.
In its recent financial results, they highlighted Zscaler AI Protect as a necessity for securing enterprise AI usage at scale. Zscaler is trying to give enterprises something most currently lack: visibility into how AI is actually being used. That means identifying which AI tools employees are using, controlling access, and monitoring how data flows into them.
This allows enterprises to move from reactive policy enforcement to proactive governance.
The AI Protect package is no longer being framed as a niche add-on for experimental AI projects. Instead, it is being positioned as a control layer for AI compliance and broader enterprise AI security.
This is already showing up in customer deals. Zscaler said a Fortune 500 semiconductor manufacturer signed an eight-figure new logo deal that included Zscaler AI Protect and data security products. Their purpose? To block unsanctioned AI applications, prevent data leakage into public large language models, and provide visibility into prompts.
One of the most telling details from the quarter came from an entertainment customer. According to Chaudhry, a major entertainment company activated Zscaler’s policy enforcement for AI traffic and discovered that 4 million AI prompts per week were now being secured. That kind of number suggests companies may be much further into shadow AI usage than leadership teams realize.
Enterprise AI Security Gets Harder as AI Agents Enter the Workflow
Zscaler is also trying to widen the conversation beyond employees using AI tools manually. The company says the next challenge for enterprise AI security will come from AI agents operating autonomously across workflows, applications, and data environments. Chaudhry explained:
“AI agents shift the threat landscape and operate autonomously at speeds far exceeding humans, exponentially increasing agentic traffic while compressing the time to prevent, detect, and respond to threats.”
That warning matters in the employee experience space because AI is increasingly being embedded into collaboration and workflow automation. Once AI agents begin acting across enterprise systems at scale, shadow AI compliance becomes harder to manage. The challenge is no longer just what employees type into AI tools, but what connected AI systems can access, share, and trigger on their own.
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