I finally saw the light: No more ChatGPT in the office.

CEOs complain that their employees aren’t embracing AI. That’s nonsense—everyone’s using it, they just don’t admit it.

When the boss demands a client plan or a sales data analysis, employees sneak into their personal ChatGPT accounts—paid out of their own pockets—and voilà, with a bit of rephrasing to cover their tracks, the report magically appears.

The savvier ones create custom ChatGPTs, shared with colleagues, that pull and paste data from corporate systems. With that, reports—complete with smart analysis—practically write themselves.

But what happens when these GPT wizards jump ship and take their custom models to a competitor? What about data security? Will clients be thrilled to know their confidential info is sitting in some employee’s personal ChatGPT account, shared with their spouse and kids for homework help?

This unmanageable jungle of personal GPTs reminds me of the glory days of Excel, when companies ran on user-made spreadsheets and macros. It was a mess of processes held together by duct tape—if someone botched a formula in the next month’s spreadsheet, service order numbers duplicated, and chaos ensued.

But the GPT jungle is even worse. It destroys the future value of the company. A company’s value increasingly hinges on two things:

1. How credible and relevant its promises are (reflected in its contracts and brand).

2. Its AI infrastructure. Soon, employees won’t do the work—they’ll train the corporate AI to do it.

I know a service company with thirty agents managing all pre- and post-sale customer processes. Salespeople, analysts, and clients collaborate to refine these agents, and those agents prop up the business. They’re doing it right.

But if your company relies on a patchwork of employees’ personal GPTs and lacks a corporate AI, it will be worth significantly less.

Today, everyone uses corporate email. Sending internal emails from a personal account looks suspicious. AI will soon be the same.

You need your company’s data sources and access points organized. You need agents and prompts—the core of your company’s know-how—to be centrally managed, yet continually built with input from everyone in the organization to maximize their power.

Can this be managed?

Of course it can. There are no excuses for the jungle of personal GPTs. I’m building an organized infrastructure on Google Agent Space. It’s not the only platform, just the one I like best.

This might sound strange now, but I promise in two years, corporate AI will be as standard as corporate email. For more articles like this, subscribe to the Newsletter Get more ideas in the book How to See What Others Don't