A healthcare network discovered that individual departments had quietly signed up for more than a dozen overlapping AI vendor tools, with no central visibility into cost, data handling, or compliance exposure.
Standing Up an Enterprise AI Council to End Shadow AI Spend
Service Provided
Capabilities Utilized
Governance Design, Vendor Rationalization, Executive Alignment
Client challenge
Without a central approval process, department heads had been procuring point solutions on corporate cards to solve immediate problems, several of which processed protected health information through vendors that had never been vetted by security or legal. Total spend on unsanctioned tools was rising quietly, hidden across dozens of expense lines.
Our solution
We stood up an Enterprise AI Council with representation from IT, legal, security, and clinical operations, and gave it real teeth: any new AI tool touching patient data or clinical workflows now routes through a single intake form and a two-week review. We also ran a full discovery sweep of existing vendor spend to surface every unsanctioned tool already in use.
To keep the council from becoming a bottleneck, we built a pre-approved “fast lane” list of vetted tools that teams could adopt without a full review, covering the majority of common use cases.
Results
The discovery sweep surfaced 14 previously unknown AI tools, three of which were immediately decommissioned over compliance risk. Consolidating the rest onto a smaller set of approved vendors cut annual AI tooling spend by $1.8 million, and the council has approved 22 new use cases in its first year with an average review time of nine business days.
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