The Hidden Tax of TPRM

Sound familiar? A new vendor gets onboarded. Someone sends over their SOC 2 report, a handful of policy docs, and maybe a completed SIG questionnaire. And then, somewhere in your team’s queue, an analyst has to sit down and actually read all of it. Map the controls. Identify the gaps. Figure out what’s missing. Write it up.

Then repeat that process for the next vendor. And the next. And the 200 after that.

Most TPRM leaders know this is painful. What they often don’t know is exactly how much it’s costing in hours, in dollars, and in the risk that quietly accumulates while assessments are still sitting in the backlog.

We decided to find out.

What 36,856 assessments tell us

We analyzed vendor assessment data from 93 organizations on the VISO TRUST platform 36,856 assessments in total, covering 607,803 reviewed artifacts. The goal was simple: understand where TPRM labor actually goes, and quantify what it costs.

The headline finding? Artifact review, the manual reading, control mapping, and gap analysis of vendor-supplied security documentation, is the single biggest cost driver in modern TPRM programs.

Different artifact types hit harder than others. A SOC 2 report can easily consume an hour or more you have to read for control coverage, assess audit scope, map findings to your specific risk framework, and identify what’s missing. ISO, HITRUST, and PCI certificates are moderately intensive. SIG and CAIQ questionnaires are structured but still require a human to interpret the answers in context. Policy documents are shorter but still need a careful read.

None of that is unreasonable on its own. The problem is volume.

There’s no way to sustain it long term as a manual questionnaire and process. Think about the entire process that could be a five, six, seven-week process…and then you’re making some life decisions as to whether this vendor is okay. It’s a little arbitrary.

Jeff Deakins, CISO, James Hardie

That word, arbitrary, is the one that should keep TPRM leaders up at night. When review cycles stretch to weeks, decisions that should be grounded in evidence start being shaped by analyst availability and backlog pressure. That’s not a risk management program. That’s triage.

The per-organization numbers are striking

Aggregate figures are useful, but the per-company data is where it gets real. Across the 93 organizations in our analysis, the average impact of AI-assisted TPRM workflows looks like this:

Metric	Per organization
Hours saved	6,780 hours
Labor cost saved	$847,000 USD
Time saved per assessment	17.1 hours
Artifacts processed	6,535
Reduction in total TPRM labor	66.3%
Reduction in artifact review time	66%

At a fully loaded analyst rate of $125/hour (a conservative figure for a compliance or TPRM specialist).

It’s not just about saving time

When we talk to TPRM teams that have freed up capacity, the conversation quickly moves past efficiency. The more interesting outcome is what they do differently. Organizations in our dataset consistently report four shifts when the artifact review backlog lifts:

1. Access more vendors

Programs are no longer capped by analyst bandwidth. Teams can onboard and assess larger vendor populations without growing headcount.

2. Clear the backlog

Automation compresses the gap between onboarding and risk evaluation, turning weeks-long queues into workflows that actually resolve.

3. Go deeper on analysis

With routine extraction handled, analysts can focus on the work that actually requires judgment: gaps, context, and escalation decisions.

4. Scale without hiring

TPRM workflows grow with the vendor portfolio, without the proportional headcount increases that have historically constrained programs.

That last one matters a lot for CISOs having budget conversations. The traditional TPRM model requires more analysts as the vendor count grows, a linear relationship that makes scaling politically difficult and expensive. AI-assisted programs break that relationship.

Without it, we would need 10 or 15 people. And are you really going to get the budget for 10 or 15, when you have a need in identity or incident response or somewhere else?

Jeff Deakins, CISO, James Hardie

The risk hiding in your backlog

There’s one more angle worth calling out, and it’s one that rarely makes it into program metrics but shows up consistently in breach post-mortems: the assessment gap.

Every day a vendor is onboarded and operational without a completed risk review is a day of unmanaged exposure. In most programs, this is simply accepted as a background cost of doing business. The backlog is long, the team is stretched, and the vendor is already live.

Compressing assessment cycle times from weeks to days doesn’t just make your team more efficient. It eliminates a category of risk that the current model treats as unavoidable, and it makes your program defensible in ways that manual processes simply can’t match.

The bottom line

Across 93 organizations and nearly 37,000 vendor assessments, the pattern is too consistent to keep treating as background noise.

The hidden tax of TPRM is real. It’s concentrated in a specific activity, artifact review, that happens to be well-suited to AI-assisted workflows. And it’s solvable.

The organizations that move on this now will build programs that scale intelligently alongside their vendor portfolios. The ones that wait will keep hiring analysts to do work that a machine can handle in minutes, and keep making risk decisions that are just a little bit arbitrary.