Apple @ Work: Most IT leaders want AI to help manage their Macs, but few are ready for it

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A new report from Fleet shows that many companies believe they’re nowhere close to using AI on their Mac fleets. They surveyed more than 500 IT decision-makers (Director-level and above, all responsible for device management at companies with 2,000+ employees), and the results show where IT teams think they are with AI.

About Apple @ Work: Bradley Chambers has been an Apple IT admin since 2009. Through his experience deploying and managing firewalls, switches, a mobile device management system, enterprise grade WiFi, 1000s of Macs, and 1000s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple IT managers deploy Apple devices, build networks to support them, train users, share stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for IT departments.

Shadow AI is happening whether IT is ready or not

According to the survey results, 46.5% of IT leaders said AI-driven automation as their top investment priority for the future. That’s the highest-ranked category in the entire survey, coming out ahead of vulnerability remediation (42.5%) and device visibility (42.1%).

One of the more shocking (and not great) results: 78% of employees are already using personal AI tools at work. Fleet shows separate data showing that the average enterprise runs 14 AI tools internally, while IT is only aware of 4 of them.

That gap for IT managers and teams is a visibility problem, while also a cost and security issue. The survey says that one company that burned through its entire 2026 token budget in 4 months after rolling out an AI coding tool to 5,000 of its engineers. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report found that breaches caused by shadow AI cost an extra $670K on average compared to a typical breach.

The IT teams responsible for securing all of the AI tools still don’t have equivalent tooling for their own work. I’ve argued privately with folks about how big a challenge AI is for IT teams right now. It’s a huge industry, and IT was just expected to “handle it”. IT teams are expected to handle security, cost management, vulnerability management, and training as well. This is on top of their existing jobs and roles. Nothing is getting taken away. This reminds of me of when IT had to learn enterprise Wi-Fi- during the mobility era and manage it on top of existing roles and responsibilities.

Wrap up

The entire survey is a good read and points out some issues I’ve believed for a few years now. IT has been given the mission to drive AI usage in a healthy, secure, and cost-effective way, but really lacks the tools to do it across their fleets. There’s a lot of work to be done here in terms of device management, network filtering, education, and telemetry. For me, one of the troubling aspects of this era is that it’s yet another thing IT has to absorb and figure out without additional headcount.

Read the survey to learn more.