The value of an AI assistant grows with every system it connects to, but every connection added for convenience is also added to the attack surface. Most organizations haven't fully mapped what that surface looks like.

When an assistant links to email, storage, and calendars, it becomes a single point that can touch data across multiple systems at once. That's efficient for users and attractive for attackers: a single manipulation can potentially reach everything it's connected to. A recent case showed a manipulated prompt reaching data across several connected services simultaneously, illustrating how connected AI applications can turn convenience into a single point of failure when permissions aren't carefully scoped.

The fix isn't disconnecting AI from enterprise systems; it's applying the same access discipline used for any third-party integration. Each connector should be scoped to the minimum it needs, revisited periodically rather than treated as a permanent setup decision, with read access clearly separated from write access and high-impact actions flagged for closer review.

Monitoring completes the picture: security teams should see which connected apps an assistant accessed, what data it retrieved, and whether that pattern changed unexpectedly.

Mapping data flows, not just permissions, also matters: knowing which application an assistant can reach is only half the picture without knowing where that data could end up if misused, including any external endpoints it could theoretically write to.

For a full breakdown of how connected-app access became part of a real attack chain, see this analysis of the CoSnitch vulnerability.