Sprawl: It’s a problem nearly as old as the IT industry itself. Introduce a new technology, and sooner rather than later, it will spiral out of control—leading to budget overruns, governance issues, and security vulnerabilities. It happened in the 1990s with datacenter hardware. It happened in the 2010s with public cloud resources. And today, it’s happening with AI.

Although organizations only began adopting AI tools at scale a couple of years ago, these solutions are already reaching the point of “uncontrolled proliferation,” said Rami Mazid, chief information officer of Nutanix.

“They’re spread all over. And unfortunately, they are resulting in inefficiencies, redundancies, and security concerns. You’re exposing your data to unknown environments.”

Mazid noted that AI solutions are particularly susceptible to sprawl because they are so readily available to users, who might decide to inadvertently upload sensitive corporate data to free versions of tools like Claude or ChatGPT. Also, he noted, organizations are “rushing” to implement AI across their organizations to avoid being left behind, without taking the time to define appropriate use cases or analyze potential return on investment.