45–67%
of employees already use AI at work — sanctioned or not.
Verizon DBIR 2026 · Salesforce 2026
Free program · Piazza Consulting Group
Your people are already using AI. The only question is whether it works for you — or leaks out of you.
Most of the workforce now uses AI every day, and most of them are self-taught, unsupervised, and pasting things they shouldn't. This is the short, practical guide to using it well — for everyone, including your engineers.
What's inside
Three things, no fluff.
01 — The Cheat Sheet
How to actually prompt
The four-part recipe, copy-paste prompts for everyday work and for writing code, and the advanced techniques that separate good output from useless output.
Open the cheat sheet →02 — The Vocabulary
Speak the language
Tokens, context windows, hallucinations, agents, RAG, prompt injection — every term you keep hearing, in plain English, with why it matters to you.
Read the glossary →03 — The Certification
Prove you're fluent
A short, honest test. Pass it and earn the Certified AI Fluent credential from Piazza Consulting Group — add it to your LinkedIn in one click.
Get certified →For leadership
The uncomfortable math every executive is now doing.
This isn't a question of whether to adopt AI. Your organization already has. The only open question is whether it's happening inside your walls or outside your control.
~18%
of organizations have a formal AI security policy in place.
Salesforce Workforce AI Survey, 2026
+$670K
added to the average data breach when shadow AI is involved.
IBM Cost of a Data Breach, 2025
4 of 14
AI tools in the average enterprise that IT actually knows about.
Productiv SaaS Intelligence, 2026
Real scenarios
How it actually plays out
None of them are reckless. They're busy, and the tool is one tab away.
Pastes a contract into a free chatbot to “just get a summary.”
Drops a config file with live keys in to debug it faster.
Uploads a scanned claim — name, date of birth, diagnosis — to pull the totals.
The part most policies miss
In that moment, your data has left the building. Under HIPAA, attorney-client privilege, or your customer contracts, the transmission itself is the exposure — whether or not anything ever leaks.
Shadow AI is already showing up in breach data
Samsung learned this when engineers pasted proprietary source code into ChatGPT. Verizon's 2026 breach data now ranks shadow AI as the third most common non-malicious insider action — up fourfold in a single year.
The gap compounds every quarter
Meanwhile, competitors who deployed AI deliberately are quoting faster, closing books sooner, and answering customers in minutes. The distance between governed adoption and shadow use widens with every quarter you wait.
Banning it doesn't work. Everyone has tried.
Companies that block AI outright simply push it onto personal phones and personal accounts, where there is even less visibility. The pattern that does work is the one that worked for shadow IT a decade ago: give people a sanctioned tool that's as good as the one they found on their own, and unauthorized use collapses.
Where Piazza comes in
Deploy AI that keeps your data inside your building.
We build and deploy enterprise AI on your terms — including fully on-premise, with no data ever leaving your network.
On-prem by design
No egress
We run AI workloads inside your environment — on your servers, even on CPU. Nothing is shipped to a third party's cloud.
Forward-deployed
We come to you
Our engineers deploy and configure on-site, wiring AI into the systems you already run — ERP, document workflows, CRM.
Built to integrate
Into your stack
Document intelligence, workflow automation, and agents that connect to your real data — with the access controls and audit trails an enterprise needs.
Start the conversation
Make AI your advantage before it becomes your incident.
Whether you want to govern the AI your team is already using or build something purpose-made for your business, Piazza Consulting Group is the partner that does it without your data leaving the room.