From Weeks to Days: How AI Is Rewriting Vendor Security Assessments

Organizations of all sizes have suppliers and vendors that constitute their supply chain. Larger businesses will have larger supply chains, but even SMEs need to consider and manage vendor risk. And not just immediate vendor risk (third parties), but also downstream risk from suppliers to their suppliers (known as fourth-party risk).

Security teams in organizations and managed service providers recognize that this supply chain risk needs to be assessed and managed. C-suite executive teams have also realized that Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) is something that they need to focus on, and they now expect their security teams to demonstrate how they are minimizing vendor risk.

Traditional ways of assessing supply chain risk have previously relied on two approaches: using security assessment questionnaires sent to suppliers to complete, and external assessments using technical tools that assess exposed network ports, look for leaked credentials, and other security markers that cyber attackers would also look for and use. This external assessment is known as “outside-in” monitoring.

As supply chain relationships have grown, it’s become clear that the traditional approach to vendor risk assessment isn’t fit for purpose. It takes too long to get questionnaires back from potential vendors, then it takes time for security experts to review the answers and make an assessment – time they could be using for other business functions. Once completed, the assessment process doesn’t account for the ever-changing threat landscape or changes within vendors. External scoring tools that use the outside-in approach are also typically a one-time effort and do not account for changes over time.

Many organizations are now turning to AI-driven vendor risk assessment tools to make the process faster and more reliable.

The problem with traditional vendor assessments

Let’s take a closer look at the problems with traditional vendor assessments.

One of the main issues with traditional vendor assessments is that they require a lot of time from many people across both organizations. It will likely take a person, or even several people with the required knowledge, many hours or days (weeks in extreme cases) to complete a security questionnaire sent by the business they want to become a vendor for. 

Once the questionnaire is complete and sent back, experts in the sending organization have to read it, assess whether the answers are detailed enough, and then determine the risk of accepting the vendor as a supplier. This is a lot of work and often means that assessments based on questionnaires are rubber-stamped after a cursory analysis of the third party’s security posture.

Score-based outside-in security assessments have their own problems. The things these outside-in security surveys examine are important, but they say nothing about how a vendor will control access to your data when you are working with them and your IT systems get linked for business and financial transactions. Do they have proper internal encryption for data at rest? Do they have good NDR in place to quickly detect and respond to anomalous behavior on their network? A score provided after an external security assessment means little beyond how their systems appear to external security probing.

Many organizations turn to external security experts to do traditional vendor risk assessments. This is a viable choice, but it can get expensive quickly. At typical cybersecurity consulting rates, the time required for all aspects of the traditional approach can quickly add up, resulting in high costs. When there are hundreds or thousands of vendors in a complex supply chain, the costs can be untenable.

How AI changes the vendor assessment process

AI-based tools can radically streamline the vendor risk assessment process. Rather than relying on third parties to complete questionnaires and then having your own internal experts or your service provider’s security team analyze the information, you can remove this time-consuming process entirely. 

Instead of asking your potential or current vendors to fill out a questionnaire, you can ask them to supply you with the security documents they should already have from building and maintaining their security strategy. Typical examples of the documents in question include SOC 2 reports, penetration test findings, SIEM reports, policy documents, security certifications, and similar materials generated by any mature security program. This approach is known as an inside-out assessment. 

With access to this existing security information, an AI-based evaluation solution like the VISO TRUST platform can automate the time-consuming parts of traditional TPRM. The AI model reads all the supplied artifacts to get a picture of the vendor’s security posture. If you’ve used any of the popular LLM-based AI chatbots, you’ll know how quickly they can read and summarize uploaded documents. 

The private AI models within the VISO TRUST platform read the provided security information, analyze it, and produce a summary of the security controls a vendor has in place and compare them against industry-recognized security frameworks, including ISO 27001, NIST CSF, HIPAA, and PCI. 

The VISO TRUST Risk Framework covers Security, Privacy, AI Trust, Resilience, and Product Security, with controls mapped to more than 30 common compliance frameworks, including NIST 800-53. Read about our security program for protecting client and vendor data here: https://visotrust.com/security/.

In real-world use, the VISO TRUST platform can complete a reading and analysis task that would take a human expert 10 hours in under a minute. This speed increase does not result in a sacrifice in the quality of the assessment. Often the opposite, as the AI model doesn’t get tired and misses things that a human might. 

Using AI-driven assessments does not remove the need for human expert judgement. Rather than spending their time reading questionnaire responses, security documents, and compiling risk spreadsheets, human experts can focus on discussing the vendor’s security posture and making decisions about the risk it poses.

The VISO TRUST platform also integrates with the enterprise communications, data storage, and service desk software that you’re probably already using. This allows discussions and data to flow to the tools your teams already use, rather than sitting in yet another data silo. Integrations include Slack, ServiceNow, Jira, Google Workspace, Microsoft, and more.

Visit https://visotrust.com/platform/integrations/ to read more.

Accuracy you can defend

The speed increase and the elimination of manual workloads mean that organizations can typically complete a vendor assessment in 5 to 7 days. And not the weeks or months it can take to do a traditional manual process. One that’s often low-quality due to the time and effort required. Using this approach results in vendor adoption rates climbing to 98% because it is easier for both the vendor and the security team to complete the security analysis. 

Speed is all very well, but it means nothing if the analysis is wrong. A common criticism of automated TPRM tools is that they sacrifice accuracy for speed and efficiency. In VISO TRUST, we tackle this criticism head-on by combining AI models with expert reviews. 

Our qualified human security analysts review every assessment that gets sent to a security team. Using this methodology, VISO TRUST guarantees 100% accuracy for the assessments provided to organizations. This guarantee is important for reasons beyond information quality. 

Organizations frequently need to demonstrate their security preparedness to auditors, regulators, and their own internal Executive team or Board. Having VISO-backed assessments and supporting documentation enables security teams to demonstrate to all interested parties that their TPRM program is grounded in qualitative data rather than arbitrary, outside-in scores or gut feelings about the vendor’s security practices. An assessment that shows which specific security artifact supported which specific finding creates an audit trail that questionnaire responses and outside-in ratings simply cannot provide.

Continuous monitoring changes the risk calculation

As mentioned previously, many security assessments are conducted at a particular time and often get forgotten about once complete. The results and risk categorization from a single point-in-time assessment like this will quickly become outdated. How a vendor looks from a security and risk perspective will likely be very different six months after passing a risk audit. There will be turnover among security staff, systems admins may not apply security patches to servers, staff with access to data stores will have changed, and the vendor’s own suppliers will likely have changed. All of these change the previously determined risk. This means a vendor can go from a low risk to a medium or high risk without anyone noticing. 

AI-driven TPRM platforms like VISO TRUST help address this drift in vendor risk by continuously monitoring vendor and fourth-party security events in real time. It flags changes in a vendor risk posture and surfaces them so the security team can reassess the risk and ask the vendor to address anything concerning. 

Ongoing risk assessment and periodic reevaluations are important. Supply chain attacks have increased in recent years as cybercriminals try to exploit vendors to bypass the security of many businesses.  

Final Thoughts – the business case in plain terms

Organizations building or reevaluating their TPRM procedures should consider the benefits of the human expert-backed, AI-driven VISO TRUST platform. It delivers rapid, accurate initial assessments and continuous monitoring of ongoing vendor risk profiles. Its efficiency enables organizations to scale their TPRM to cover their entire third-party and fourth-party vendor population. 

Security leaders in organizations often face questions justifying the costs of TPRM assessments. This is understandable given how much time traditional TPRM can cost. Switching to the AI-driven TPRM platform from VISO TRUST makes those conversations easier: 

• Assessment time drops from weeks to 5-7 days on average.
• Staff costs related to manual review drop by up to 90%
• Vendor adoption reaches 98%, enabling faster onboarding and lower vendor risk.
• Every assessment gets backed by a 100% accuracy guarantee based on expert review.

These improvements are not incremental. They flow from a different way of thinking about vendor assessment and from the use of tools that are fit for the task at hand. The VISO TRUST Platform is one of the best AI vendor security assessment software solutions. 

To book a demo to see what AI-driven vendor assessments look like in practice, visit the AI-first third-party risk platforms page.