Your Company’s AI Is Getting Smarter. But Whose Intelligence Is It Building?

InnovationYour Company’s AI Is Getting Smarter. But Whose Intelligence Is It Building?ByRaghav Ramabadran,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 20, 2026, 09:00am EDTRaghav Ramabadran, CEO, Intelligine Technologies. getty​Consider what a typical enterprise sends to AI platforms on any given day. The marketing team uploads draft campaign materials for review and refinement. The legal department pastes contract language and asks for analysis. The finance team submits internal forecasts and asks the model to identify trends. Product teams upload competitive analyses. Engineering teams paste proprietary code and ask for debugging assistance. Each interaction, considered individually, seems innocuous: a small convenience, a minor time savings, a reasonable use of a powerful tool.But considered collectively, across hundreds or thousands of employees, repeated thousands of times per day, the interactions constitute something far more significant. They constitute the gradual, systematic transfer of an organization's institutional knowledge (e.g., pricing strategies, competitive intelligence, customer data, legal positions and proprietary technology) into systems that the organization does not own and cannot govern.​The canonical early case remains instructive. When Samsung lifted internal restrictions on ChatGPT use in its semiconductor division in March 2023, engineers used the tool for exactly the kinds of tasks it was designed to assist with (e.g., debugging proprietary source code, analyzing chip-testing data, summarizing internal meetings). Within weeks, Samsung identified at least three separate incidents in which employees had uploaded confidential company information into the system.The exposures did not result from an external breach or intrusion. Employees themselves entered sensitive material into a...