The Pilot Worked. That’s Not the Same as Being Ready.
A small team spins up a chatbot to handle customer questions. It answers correctly, employees love it, and within a week someone is feeding it contract drafts and customer records because it’s faster than asking a colleague. Six months later, nobody can say with confidence where that data went, how long it’s been retained, or what it would take to switch providers if the pricing changed overnight. Nothing broke. No one did anything reckless. And yet the company has quietly built a system it cannot fully see, let alone audit.