Regulatory / Risk · Universities & Higher Education

Shadow AI is now the institution's biggest unmeasured risk.

Tokto gives the institution's risk and compliance officer one record that ties every prompt, every model output, and every vendor-shared AI use to a department, a course, and a data classification, ready for the Department of Education, OCR, the IRB, the funding agency, and the risk committee.

What keeps you up at night

Educause data lands on the desk: 94% of staff use AI, 56% on unsanctioned tools. A misconfiguration leaks tens of thousands of student records. The risk committee asks the CRO for the institution-wide AI exposure and the controls behind it. The answer is hundreds of department-level experiments and no shared record.

  • Every AI interaction scored and recorded against a department, a course, a study, a model version, and a data classification.
  • A single evidence layer that the Department of Education, OCR, the IRB, the funding agency, and the risk committee read against the same record.
  • Policy enforced at the prompt: FERPA records blocked, IRB-protected data redacted, export-controlled research stopped before tokens leave the boundary.
  • AI risk that is measured by department, controlled at the prompt, and attestable to the board of trustees and the funder.
  • Shadow AI is never measured. The first number is tens of thousands of leaked student records.
  • Student PII flows into an unsanctioned tool. The control gap is the FERPA exposure.
  • Restricted research data routes through a non-US model on a grant. The register never flagged it.
  • The board of trustees asks if AI risk is within appetite. The CRO has a heat map, not a record.

Tokto turns shadow AI from an unmeasured exposure into a managed control. Every faculty co-pilot, every administrative assistant, every research model, every vendor-shared AI use becomes a scored record at the moment of output, tied to the department, the course, the data classification, and the policy in force. The risk function sees what was hundreds of separate experiments as one exposure.

When the Department of Education asks how FERPA was governed across an AI tool, when OCR opens an inquiry, when the funding agency asks how restricted research stayed inside the grant, the answer is one query against the system of record. The CRO reports AI risk alongside enrollment and funding risk, with a control and a trail.