According to the first official artificial intelligence statistics published by TurkStat, 7.5 percent of enterprises in Turkey state that they use artificial intelligence. The same bulletin shows that 19.2 percent of individuals use generative artificial intelligence. Individual use is 2.5 times corporate declaration. Among enterprises that do not use artificial intelligence, 74.2 percent cite a lack of expertise as the reason, yet a significant share of the employees inside those same organisations already use these tools. With 30 percent growth in a single year, Turkey is among the countries increasing artificial intelligence use fastest, and that momentum is produced by individual adoption rather than corporate budget decisions.

The central argument of the report is this: Banning a technology does not remove it, it only pushes it off the books and makes it impossible to measure. In a study of 48,340 employees across 47 countries, 57 percent say they hide their artificial intelligence use from their manager and 48 percent say they have uploaded company data to publicly available tools. In IBM's 2026 report, the share of security incidents involving shadow artificial intelligence more than doubled in one year to reach 43 percent, and the average cost of a data breach rose to 6 million dollars. Even so, 68 percent of organisations have no process capable of detecting this use. The main variable determining whether an employee discloses their use is not policy but organisational trust. What is needed is not a penalty but a mechanism of record.

The six chapters cover the following: The gap between corporate declaration and individual use together with the six forms of shadow artificial intelligence, the scale divide alongside sectoral concentration and the retreat of governance, three layers of risk with measured costs and the legal framework for personal data protection, the five reasons for concealment together with the arithmetic of the ban and psychological safety, the individual usage profile with task drift and a five year horizon, and the first seven days, checklists and a 90 day plan for employees, managers, organisations and policy makers.

The report is public and may be shared freely with attribution. It contains no commercial offer or product promotion. It does not constitute a legal opinion, an information security audit, or medical or financial advice. Figures marked with an asterisk are StrategyThrust models or estimates, and primary sources are listed in the methodology appendix of the report.

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