With artificial intelligence (AI) on everyone's mind these days, it's fair to ask what's real and what's hype around this evolving technology (in fact, we tackled that very question on a recent webcast).

It might seem like just a fun (or infuriating) conversation piece, but AI is already intersecting with your organization in meaningful ways. It's likely to be in your products or on your roadmap, and it's definitely in your supply chain and third-party ecosystem. That means AI will impact both software buyers and sellers—there are transformative opportunities for third-party risk management and customer trust centers.

In this article, we're going to look closely at what AI means for the future of both sides of the TPRM process. We'll focus on the core, traditional problems in our industry and how AI will solve them in practical terms. In the spirit of transparency, it's important to note that we are big believers—Whistic will always be a leader in AI innovation, and this is our vision for the future. Here's why we're so excited.

AI and Customer Trust: Faster, Simpler Process with Greater Transparency

In our recent survey of more than 500 cybersecurity and risk leaders, 96% of respondents said they would be more likely to buy from a vendor that is transparent about security posture than one who's not. So, you're not just competing on quality, service, and cost—but also on how forthright you are about your security posture.

But "be more transparent" isn't a strategy on its own; software vendors and third-parties have traditionally faced numerous challenges in sharing their security posture. Let's take a look at the way AI addresses these problems.

Old Problem: It takes lots of time and resources to build and maintain your own trust center—engineering has to create it, InfoSec must provide documentation and controls, and the organization must keep updating it manually as you evolve.

AI Solution: An AI-powered trust center like Whistic Profile will allow you to fully automate this process by making your security documentation polished, accessible, and queryable (we're coining the term) in seconds.

Your AI trust center will also integrate seamlessly with your internal systems, so controls, compliance, and security posture can be updated automatically when changes are introduced. A dynamic trust center means you can invest all the extra time and resources it once took maintaining your posture in more business-critical activities.

AI trust centers will also help you leverage transparency as a competitive advantage. Our survey data shows that for 90% of buyers, publicly publishing and sharing security information increases trust. Whistic integrates with your G2 product profile, so buyers can make smarter decisions earlier in the procurement process. And AI ensures that your buyers will always see the most up-to-date information, instantaneously.

Old Problem: Customer can't or won't accept your trust center—so you're right back to time-consuming manual questionnaires that slow down the sales process.

AI Solution: 100% acceptance of your trust center. An AI-powered platform will provide correct, contextual answers to any questionnaire from any customer, regardless of assessment type. This means that all of your customers and prospects will receive the detailed security information they need to work with you, on-demand. Essentially, AI will eliminate all the manual tasks associated with responding to security questionnaire requests, maximizing your transparency and making you easy to do business with.

Even if you aren't able to share every aspect of your security posture for various regulatory or competitive reasons, AI will still save your customers time by making the process simple and automated around the information you are able to share. And the proactive approach also takes sales and security teams out of the assessment-response process, freeing them up to focus on selling and protecting.

Old Problem: The endless back-and-forth for additional information after the initial assessment has been conducted.

AI Solution: An AI-powered trust center will be able to address customer questions directly and instantly. Whistic's Knowledge Base with Smart Search will respond to queries, providing context, documentation, and citations for its responses to maximize trust and eliminate back-and-forth.

AI and Third-Party Risk Management: True Zero-Touch Assessments for Safe, Fast Procurement

With the proliferation of cloud and SaaS solutions, the need for fast, reliable security assessments is greater than ever. But the process has also grown increasingly complex—software buyers must create a robust formula for ranking risk, align it with the appropriate questionnaires and assessment types, and develop a process for issue management.

Here's how the future of AI will help buyers eliminate the complexity of security assessments to move forward with preferred vendors with greater speed and confidence.

Old Problem: Slow or non-existent response rates on security questionnaire requests.

AI Solution: 100% assessment response rates. AI-powered assessment tools like Whistic Assess will automatically collect and review security posture from any vendor's trust center, or from thousands of vendors at once in the Whistic Trust Catalog. If your preferred vendor doesn't have a proactive trust center, AI will be able to create an assessable security profile by aggregating vendor information from their website and all other existing digital sources.

This means there will effectively be no vendors that you can't assess instantly. No more hunting for the right contact and praying for a quick response—or any response at all.

In fact, AI has the capability to transform procurement by eliminating the need to send out security questionnaires at all—we call this a "Zero-Touch" assessment. Whistic Assess will be equipped with an Assurance Center that allows you to prioritize only your most critical security controls, while AI-powered search identifies only those vendors that meet your requirements. This allows you to engage instantly with vendors you can trust.

Old Problem: Insufficient insight to make critical buying decisions quickly—or mountains of data to sift through to find what you need.

AI Solution: AI-powered TPRM platforms like Whistic will have the ability to instantly search and summarize security documentation and postures, so you don't have to manually pore through disorganized data to find the insights that matter most in your purchases choices.

This means no more tedious, manual back-and-forth to get the deeper answers you need to act with confidence. You also won't have to wait for your response, so you can make a quick evaluation, or even assess multiple vendors simultaneously, so you can select the right solution to the challenges that had you assessing vendors in the first place.

Old Problem: Poor visibility and business silos across the assessment process

AI Solution: AI will give stakeholders across the buying journey up-to-the-moment information on vendor assessments and procurement. The Whistic Platform automates notifications and executive summaries, so no messages or information is missed across silos in your business. This is especially important when the business unit requesting new software isn't connected closely with procurement; AI will give them the visibility they need to track the process without hounding their peers for updates.

It's also important to remember the key reason to conduct security assessments: to identify potential risks and understand how to properly allocate resources to manage them and remediate issues. AI makes it possible to automate your issue management, continually monitoring flagged risks and providing detailed recommendations for remediation based on up-to-date industry standards and frameworks.

Whistic is Delivering the Future of AI to TPRM and Customer Trust

The Whistic mission has always been to empower organizations to put security first by making it fast and simple for buyers and sellers to assess risk and validate trust. In our first seven years, we took the time necessary to conduct and respond to security assessments from weeks or months to days. Now, our AI-powered platform is taking that time from days to minutes.

As the only TPRM and trust platform you'll ever need, we're delivering AI capabilities to both sides of the process:

100% acceptance of your trust center with Whistic Profile—unburden sales and security and respond instantly to every customer or prospect
100% response rate on security assessment requests with Whistic Assess—no more waiting around for answers; proactively screen for the vendors who meet your needs instantly
Never manually send or respond to a security questionnaire again—without sacrificing safety and trust

We also understand how important it is to assess the possible risks of AI in your supply chain. That's why we're the first platform to provide industry-standard frameworks for assessing AI use cases:

Automated questionnaires based on the EU's capAI framework, the ISO 23053 framework, and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.
Total transparency in our own full-service TPRM platform—our security posture is public through our own Whistic Security Profile

Our vision for the AI future is clear, and we are leading the charge in delivering these capabilities to every software buyer and seller in single, intuitive platform. If you're tired of all the AI hype, let us show you what real AI looks like in practice. Schedule your hassle-free demo today and see the future in action.