Every other employee at Russian companies uses a personal AI account for work, Pachca study finds
A survey of 798 employees: 88% use AI at work, but only one in four say their company has rolled it out officially, with tools and rules
88% of employees at Russian companies use AI at work, but only one in four say their company has rolled out AI officially, with tools and rules. That's according to a study by the Pachca team chat app, which surveyed 798 employees of small, mid-sized and large companies from June 30 to July 18, 2026. Full data and charts are at pachca.com/ai-report
58% of AI users handle work tasks through personal accounts. That's roughly every other person surveyed. These accounts sit outside company rules and access controls, a phenomenon known as shadow AI. Studies abroad show something similar: according to KPMG, 57% of employees hide their AI use from management, and in a PagerDuty survey, 34% of office workers said they had entered confidential customer data into public AI services.
Among those who regularly work from a personal account, 88% use international models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others, and 14% use Russian ones. Among those who don't use a personal account for work, international models also lead (65%), but Russian ones are used twice as often, at 28%. Respondents could choose more than one option, so the shares don't add up to 100%.
"The most motivated employees found a new tool on their own, figured it out and pay for the subscription themselves so they can work faster. All companies can do now is catch up with their people," said Grigory Lyubachev, co-founder and business development director at the Pachca team chat app.
The more systematically a company rolls out AI, the less shadow AI there is. Where AI hasn't been rolled out, 55% of respondents regularly use personal accounts for work. With a partial rollout, it's 43%, and with a centralized rollout, 27%. The gap is nearly twofold, but it shows a correlation, not a cause.
The sample includes more digital teams than the market average, so the shares should be read as an upper estimate. This is the first part of the study. The second part will cover how companies are bringing AI agents into their workflows.
About the company
Pachca is a team chat app for large and mid-sized businesses with rich integrations and AI agents: an open API, CLI, SDK, an n8n plugin and a platform for connecting AI agents. It's one of the largest team chat apps in Russia and is available in the cloud or as hybrid on-premise (BYOK). Listed in the Russian Software Registry, it's used by more than 250,000 employees in the financial, telecom, industrial and IT sectors. Customers include Lamoda, Ivi, products from the Yandex ecosystem, Burger King, Renaissance Health and products from major banks such as Alfa-Bank, PSB and others. In total, the platform serves more than 1,000 organizations.
Website: pachca.com
Media inquiries: team@pachca.com
