Bottom line: AI amplifies existing problems: companies with poor data hygiene and undocumented processes accelerate their compliance risks rather than their business processes when implementing AI.
Many German-speaking companies invest billions in AI projects while simultaneously operating fax machines and having failed to digitalize their base processes. This leads to considerable security and compliance issues.
The paradox is real: according to Bitkom, 18 percent of German companies still regularly use fax machines in 2025. At the same time, billion-euro budgets for AI transformation are approved – often in the same company, the same IT department. The fax is not a curiosity, but a symptom: it reveals an underlying analog ecosystem of proprietary legacy systems, Excel-based core processes, and paper-based approval workflows that have never been fundamentally questioned.
When such companies implement AI, they get a more expensive problem instead of a solution. AI is an amplifier – it not only carries more load, but also more of existing deficiencies: dirty data, undocumented processes, shadow IT. Those who accelerate these structures with AI accelerate the problem. This also manifests in practice: two factions work past each other – legacy teams struggle for stable base processes and data hygiene, while digital and transformation teams advance AI use cases without addressing the fundamental problems.
An additional risk lies in data security. AI accelerates not only processes, but also data breaches. Language models working on unstructured and uncontrolled enterprise data do not distinguish between confidential and public information. They pass on what they find. The IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 documents the structural failure: 97 percent of companies that reported an AI-related security incident had no proper AI access controls in place. This leads to GDPR violations, uncontrolled data leaks, and liability risks.
The core of the problem: whoever does not know today what data they own, where it is located, and how clean it is, does not have an AI problem – they have a base problem that no AI strategy solves. AI thereby becomes a risk and liability question. CTOs who transfer processes to AI systems without clarifying this foundation risk not only operational inefficiency, but loss of control over critical data and compliance violations.
Source: www.it-daily.net · Published June 13, 2026
Lumi AI News — AI-assisted curation pursuant to Article 50 EU AI Act. Paraphrase and classification by Lumi News Pipeline v1.7.1.