The use of AI agents is soaring in the retail sector, but visibility remains a major challenge, with regulated data at risk.
* The retail sector's use of AI has surged over the past year, and while some trends point to greater security oversight of AI tools, others suggest that organizations still have a long way to go.
* "Retailers are moving quickly from experimentation to widespread AI adoption," the security firm Netskope said in a report published on Tuesday.
* Netskope offered several recommendations for how businesses could improve their visibility and control over AI use, including to limit the exposure of sensitive data.
Dive Insight:
Retailers have tightened their grips on employees' use of AI, Netskope found, to the point that most tools are centrally managed rather than individually installed. The share of retail employees using ungoverned AI tools fell from 70% to 44% since Netskope's last annual report, while the share of employees using officially approved tools rose from 40% to 73%. Overall, two-thirds of retail employees use some form of standalone AI tool.
But that good news comes with a caveat, according to the report, because standalone AI tools aren't the ...