It’s easy to get swept up in all the excitement around artificial intelligence (we do it all the time). Even if you’re a skeptic, you probably have at least some ideas about what AI might mean for you and your organization.

But whether you’re eagerly anticipating the huge leaps promised by AI or simply covering your bases, it’s hard to move forward without a real, actionable foundation of AI’s value.

That’s especially true for third-party risk and InfoSec leaders, who by professional necessity must weigh the potential for negative outcomes against the potential for gains with any new software or technology. Real-world AI use cases—not just a parade of “mights”—are necessary to calibrate the risk/reward analysis that supports business strategy.

We are firm believers that AI will help TPRM leaders evaluate risk, help vendors demonstrate trust in their own AI capabilities, and help both sides of the process do more with their time and resources. Luckily, you don’t have to take our word for it. Here are two ways Whistic AI is having an impact on TPRM today.

The New Trust Center: Knowledge Base with AI-Powered Smart Search

Whistic Profile provides InfoSec teams from software vendors and third parties a centralized platform to manage security and compliance information, so it’s fast and easy to publish, share, and meet the security assessment needs of their customers and prospects.

AI-powered Knowledge Base provides a more intuitive way to store, organize, and intelligently search security documentation and self-assessments. It turbochargers your trust center, empowering both sides of the TPRM process without sacrificing security or controls. Here’s how it works and why it matters.

Security Assessment Process Before Knowledge Base

In the past, InfoSec teams have owned all security documentation, where question banks to assist with security questionnaires were often maintained manually. That meant that, in order to provide an accurate response to a specific security question, you’d have to know exactly what information was contained within each document.

This leads to two key challenges:

It makes internal teams reliant on InfoSec to locate specific information and respond to questionnaires. This is a huge tax on InfoSec time, and it also creates a bottleneck in the sales process as teams have longer waits for responses and less visibility.
If prospects and customers choose a customized security questionnaire for assessments, pre-determined answers and even basic automation are impossible. That means it’s back to the “CTRL+F” drawing board hunting for info and guessing at relevant search terms—document by document, assessment after assessment.

Assessments with Knowledge Base and AI

Knowledge Base comes equipped with Smart Search, so you can easily locate and share approved information without having to rely entirely on InfoSec.

Smart Search utilizes AI for sophisticated, contextualized answers to queries. So, users can query Smart Search for specific information or questionnaire answers—even if they are customized or even phrased oddly—and return more nuanced, precise results, along with an accuracy rating. This is possible because the AI engine understands the relationships among words, concepts, and entities within a query.

In other words, it understands the intent of the question. That means that regardless of how a question is phrased, the AI that powers Smart Search can find an answer from your existing security documentation or past self-assessments.

Here’s what this means for software buyers and sellers:

More resources for InfoSec, more self-service for Sales—Overtaxed security teams no longer have to be the only source of truth when it comes to answering security questions for customers. Because Knowledge Base has contextual search, Sales (and Legal or Procurement) can locate precise answers for prospects. That means faster sales and renewal cycles, and more available resources for your InfoSec team. The best part is that Knowledge Base still has security controls, so your organization only shares approved security information—without needing constant oversight from InfoSec.
No more fear of the customized questionnaire—The problem with customized questionnaires before was not a lack of answers; it was the deep-dive you had to do to find them in your existing documentation because of the specific framing of a question. But because Smart Search understands question intent, it can automatically source the right answer, even if the framing of the query is unique.
Faster, more complete assessment responses for buyers—Because questionnaires are so much easier to respond to, software buyers get the answers they need faster. But quality increases, too, because Smart Search allows buyers to hone in on the most critical questions, find detailed answers to their questions within vendor documentation (along with links to sources), and track questions that are asked most often to make future assessments even easier.

New Standards and Frameworks: AI Security Questionnaires to Measure Risk

AI is a huge part of our future here at Whistic, but like any technology, we understand there are risks to consider. That’s why it’s important to be able to assess the risks of AI in your own products and in your supply chain.

Until now, there have been some unique challenges in assessing AI risk. It can be very challenging to understand:

Which of your third-parties are using AI in the first place, or what they’re using it for
Whether or not a vendor used AI to build their software
How vendors approached security and controls in the development phase—especially given the speed at which things are moving right now

And it’s not just a challenge for buyers who need to add new solutions to their tech stack. Software vendors that utilize AI in their products must also build trust and confidence in the marketplace to gain a competitive edge. Whistic is helping with all these challenges.

Security standards and frameworks are often very useful in the TPRM process because they have been vetted, cover the largest number of common risk vectors, and streamline security assessments for customers and vendors. That’s why Whistic is the only TPRM platform for buyers and sellers to develop questionnaires based on the most up-to-date AI frameworks. Whistic users have access to questionnaires base on:

ISO 25053 standard
NIST AI Framework
capAI standard, derived from the EU AI Act

With questionnaires based on industry standards, buyers have a baseline for assessing AI risk, and vendors have a means of self-assessment that can be added to their trust centers or Whistic Profile to proactively share with prospects and customers.

Whistic is Walking the Walk with AI Capabilities…Right Now!

We want to be the only third-party risk management platform you’ll ever need, and that means we make innovation a priority. That’s why we are building real-world AI capabilities into our product right now—no “mights” or “maybes” about it.

If you are interested in AI but need to see it to believe it, please let us show you all the things that are possible with Whistic today (AND all the exciting things on our immediate road map). Whether you’re a software buyer or seller, give us 30 minutes and we’ll show you how our approach can transform your business. Schedule your hassle-free consultation today.