Donatas Tamelis
CEO
With more than 15 years of experience in product development and business leadership, Donatas focuses on growing NordLayer and shaping cybersecurity solutions around customer needs.
Summary: NordLayer AI Scout gives visibility into how sanctioned and unsanctioned AI tools are used in an organization and prevents data leaks with built-in DLP.
AI adoption is moving faster than IT teams can track it. Employees use AI tools, many of which are outside of company oversight. This leaves gaps that put data security at risk.
According to a University of Melbourne report, only 42% of employees use company-provided AI tools, while 70% still choose free, public LLMs at work. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2026 found that shadow AI was behind 43% of all security incidents up from 20% in 2025.
NordLayer AI Scout brings all company-wide AI activity into one view and adds controls built specifically for AI use
Read on to discover how it works.
Key takeaways
- AI adoption is outpacing IT teams’ ability to track it, and shadow AI creates new blind spots and data leak risks.
- NordLayer AI Scout monitors AI usage across the web and desktop—both sanctioned and unsanctioned—with no employee friction.
- Built-in AI DLP inspects prompts before they’re submitted and can issue warnings, perform redactions, or block them.
- The solution goes beyond the chat box, mapping the MCP servers and skills AI agents connect to.
- Adoption metrics reflect real AI usage, not provisioned seats, and include estimated token spend across all deployed LLMs.
You can’t secure what you can’t see.
Get visibility and control into AI activity within your network.
NordLayer AI Scout, built for how AI actually works
NordLayer AI Scout gives a single view of company-wide AI usage, which lets organizations decide where to add security controls instead of blindly blocking all AI tools.
Andrius Buinovskis, VP of Product Strategy at NordLayer, says:
“What companies are facing today is an AI zoo—dozens of unsanctioned LLMs in daily use across the workforce, each one widening the organization’s exposure to data leaks and security breaches. Real AI governance requires broad visibility. Organizations need telemetry that brings all AI use, sanctioned or not, into one platform.”
Vakaris Noreika, VP of Product Research and Development at NordLayer, adds that NordLayer AI Scout is built for how AI actually works and for what happens at a technical level
So, what can NordLayer AI Scout do? Here are its capabilities:
Shadow AI detection
Managing the sprawl of AI tools is a challenge for every organization. NordLayer AI Scout provides visibility into both approved and unapproved AI usage from a single, clear dashboard. It shows which web-based and native LLMs employees actually use.
Built-in AI DLP
What sets NordLayer AI Scout apart from other LLM observability solutions is its built-in AI data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities Unlike traditional DLP tools, NordLayer AI Scout is engineered to observe AI prompts. Vakaris Noreika explains how it works:
“AI DLP inspects prompts and controls them pre-submission, so sensitive data is never submitted in the first place.”
A view of DLP findings in NordLayer AI Scout’s dashboard
This means NordLayer AI Scout’s AI DLP scans prompts on-device before they reach the model. It can also warn, redact, or block the prompt if an employee tries to share sensitive data with an AI tool in the browser.
Full oversight of agentic AI
Agent visibility maps what AI agents can access, including resources, knowledge, and critical information, which enables true AI governance.
NordLayer AI Scout moves beyond the chat and provides oversight through:
- An MCP server catalog with a live view of the MCP servers that coding agents connect to.
- An inventory of the skills and capabilities available to every coding agent in the organization.
Metrics on actual AI adoption
Evaluating whether AI investments pay off is another challenge for companies. NordLayer AI Scout measures real AI usage across AI tools employees interact with, whether approved or not, based on observed activity, rather than provisioned seats
You get visibility into:
- True adoption depth across teams and tools
- Active versus paid-for licenses
- Estimated token spend across all deployed LLMs
A view of AI adoption metrics in NordLayer AI Scout’s dashboard
With that data, you can optimize AI spend and identify areas of high adoption and risk.
NordLayer AI Scout in practice: Oxylabs
Before deploying NordLayer AI Scout, Oxylabs—a global web intelligence company valued at $3.6 billion—had limited visibility into AI usage and spend Every AI tool had its own dashboard, with different calculations and mappings. Constant API updates, pricing changes, discounts, and caching caused the AI usage data to drift.
Another major concern was AI data security There were risks tied to machine-to-machine access, high-frequency querying, and security-related tokens that could end up in prompts.
Oxylabs was planning to build its own tracking tool, a narrowly scoped, CLI-based solution, which would have taken significant engineering time to build, not to mention ongoing maintenance. Instead, the company rolled out NordLayer AI Scout across 469 devices in under 2 weeks
The payoff was immediate:
- Optimized AI usage Monthly Claude team seats are now matched to actual usage across 3 license tiers.
- Faster security review The risk team gets flagged DLP findings instead of having to manually comb through raw AI activity.
- A foundation for AI governance With real AI usage and spend data, Oxylabs can now set policies based on evidence.
“NordLayer AI Scout is a browser extension and desktop sensor architecture that collects data from all company-wide AI tools in one place, and it’s a really useful tool for us,” summarizes Martynas Jočys, Data Engineering Tech Lead at Oxylabs.
See your AI with NordLayer AI Scout
NordLayer AI Scout is available to all organizations starting today. Contact our team to learn how to bring your AI use out of the shadows.
