ver half of us now use AI to search the web, yet the stubbornly low data accuracy of common tools creates new business risks. While generative AI (GenAI) offers undeniable efficiency gains, a new investigation highlights a disparity between user trust and technical accuracy that poses specific risks to corporate compliance, legal standing, and financial planning. For the C-suite, the adoption of these tools represents a classic ‘shadow IT’ challenge. According to a survey of 4,189 UK adults conducted in September 2025, around a third of users believe AI is already more important to them than standard web searching. If employees trust these tools for personal queries, they are almost certainly employing them for business research. The investigation, conducted by Which?, suggests that unverified reliance on these platforms could be costly. Around half of AI users report trusting the information they receive to a ‘reasonable’ or ‘great’ extent. Yet, looking at the granularity of the responses provided by AI models, that trust is often misplaced.