The Security Problem Every SaaS Company Has But Won't Talk About

Every SaaS company rushed to ship AI features. Now they’re sitting on a security problem they can’t talk about.

Here’s what happened:

Competitor announces AI copilot. Your customers start asking why you don’t have one. You have maybe 3 months to ship something or risk losing deals.

So everyone shipped. Fast.

The result: AI assistants now sit on top of everything. CRM data, document repositories, code bases, support ticket histories, customer communications. Access to the whole stack.

And most went live with security as a “we’ll get to that later” problem.

The Trade-off

The issue isn’t that companies didn’t know better. They did. But the alternative was watching competitors win while they spent 6 months building proper security architecture.

So they made the trade: ship now, fix later.

Now companies are quietly backfilling the security controls that should have been there from day one. Permission systems. Access controls. Audit logs. All the things you’d normally build before giving an AI assistant access to your entire data layer.

But rolling back access now means admitting the feature shipped half-baked. So instead, these AI features stay live in production with “evolving” security controls.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Most enterprise security teams know they’re exposed. They understand the risk.

But competitive pressure forced the decision. Every SaaS company made the same calculation at roughly the same time.

Ship the AI feature or lose customers. Security comes second.

Now the industry is racing to retrofit security onto AI assistants that are already deeply embedded in production systems, touching sensitive data across the entire enterprise stack.

The question isn’t whether this is happening. It’s how many more months until someone finds a way to exploit it at scale.