How Integrated Workflows Power AI-First TPRM

Whistic recently launched the next generation of our suite of AI capabilities, called Assessment Copilot. This evolution of our own industry-leading AI enhances automation and increases the richness of vendor risk assessments while reducing the time, resources, and costs.

We think of this transformation as AI-first, modern third-party risk management (TPRM). But what exactly does that mean for your business? Let’s take a closer look at Assessment Copilot: what it means to be AI first, what modernization looks like in the assessment process, and how it creates value for your business. 

What is Assessment Copilot?

Assessment Copilot is a suite of capabilities that make it possible to automate vendor risk assessments. Whistic AI allows you to remove manual steps in the process with three core capabilities.

• Vendor Summary: This is the core capability of our Assessment Copilot suite, and it allows you to use Whistic AI to fully assess the documentation of your third-party or vendor and match that against your risk framework of choice.
• SOC 2 Summary: We don’t believe you should ever have to read a SOC 2 audit report again. The average company spends 2-3 hours per assessment simply reviewing lengthy reports. SOC 2 Summary uses your control framework to surface only the most relevant details of an auditor’s findings and presents them in a 5-page document that is easy to review and share.
• Vendor Insights: This is the ability to do a federated search across your entire vendor population utilizing as much vendor documentation as you’ve collected in your vendor inventory or system of record. This may be necessary in the event of a zero-day incident or a change to your organization's security requirements (such as new regulation or a new product that changes your risk profile). 

In addition to these core capabilities, Assessment Copilot’s AI is built as an integrated part of the process rather than as an add-on to an existing system. AI use cases proliferate the world of software solutions, but many companies are simply trying to catch the zeitgeist instead of thoughtfully developing high-value AI capabilities. That’s why Whistic has built our AI with three guiding principles in mind. In order to deliver clear, measurable results, has targeted three primary goals:

• Reduce the friction between customers and vendors
• Automate manual or redundant steps in the assessment process
• Reduce the need to send, answer, and review security questionnaires

What Does “AI-First, Modern TPRM” Mean?

The foundation of modern TPRM is the AI-first workflow. This differs from a legacy, questionnaire-based workflow by coupling with your system of record (a vendor inventory of information) and continuous monitoring (in the Whistic platform, this is provided by MasterCard RiskRecon). This makes it possible to begin an automated assessment with the information you have, reducing the need for a lengthy, manual questionnaire. 

AI-first workflows allow you to automate and summarize existing security documentation; summarize lengthy audit reports like SOC 2s; and assess the findings against your chosen security framework. This often makes it possible to complete a thorough assessment, but if additional information is needed, it greatly reduces the burden on the vendor. 

Whistic’s platform is the only in the industry to integrate AI-first workflows into the assessment process in this way, and it’s already creating massive value for our customers. A Fortune-200 Financial Services Company is utilizing Assessment Copilot and seeing high-impact results, including:

• Time Savings: Our customer has seen enormous value through time saved. They’ve taken the time their team spends on each assessment from 12-15 hours down to 1-3 hours—an 80% reduction. They’ve also improved the pace of business, reducing the overall turnaround time for an assessment (including exchanges with the vendor) by 87%.
• Cost savings: Our customer estimates a cost-savings of close to $500K each year with AI-first TPRM. This makes sense when you look at third-party trends. In each of the last three years, Whistic survey data shows that vendor inventories are growing. At the same time, the cost of TPRM resources is increasing as well. This means that companies are spending more each year to keep pace with the demand for third-party services. By improving the speed and quality of assessments, businesses can dramatically reduce costs. 
• Improved risk posture: Modern TPRM makes it possible to assess more vendors in greater depth due to time and resource savings. Our customer was able to better identify and remediate existing risk, and they were also able to reallocate TPRM resources to managing risks throughout the vendor lifecycle. 

But the best way to understand the impact it can have for your business—the ability to assess more vendors in greater depth in less time—is to go through an assessment and see it for yourself. Let’s take a look at an AI-first assessment in action.

Starting the Assessment

Inside the Whistic platform, you can select the “Start Assessment” button, which will begin the workflow and guide you through the process. If you are assessing an existing vendor, you will first notice that there is already existing security content available from past interactions. This may be a trust center shared by the vendor, documents like SOC 2 audits, or previously completed questionnaires—all of which can be used as part of the assessment. 

You’ll also have access to the Whistic Trust Catalog, which is our dual-sided exchange where vendors can upload a profile of security intelligence. It’s a growing library that includes thousands or profiles, and on average, our customers can complete between 5% and 15% of their assessments using a Trust Catalog profile without having to request additional info. 

Use What You Have to Begin the Automated Assessment

So, if you’ve worked with the vendor before (for example, if this is a regular reassessment), if they have a completed profile in the Trust Catalog, or they’ve shared any documentation with you via email, you have enough information to begin an assessment.

This is where the AI-first approach really departs from the old “legacy” approach; in the past, your only recourse was to send a questionnaire and wait for your vendor to respond. It was sometimes weeks of waiting. You can now select the documents you do have, and the platform gives you the option to launch AI Assessment Copilot to perform an assessment.

It’s also important to remember that the Whistic platform allows you to easily request additional resources within your assessment workflow. You can still request a questionnaire if you choose, but it’s far easier for your vendor to send along an NDA and a SOC 2 report than manually fill out your questionnaire. So you can request supplementary documents at any stage in the process to assist in the assessment, and this can be done in parallel with the automated assessments to save you more time. 

Select Your Framework and Automate the Assessment

Next, we’ll launch the Copilot process by selecting the framework you’d like to use to assess the vendor documents against. This can be standard framework you use for regulatory purposes or your own customized version. 

After you’ve identified your chosen framework, you can select the AI capabilities you’d like to use as part of the assessment. As we mentioned earlier, Assessment Copilot is truly powered by our Vendor Summary and SOC 2 Summary functionality. Once you’ve selected those options, Whistic AI is going to immediately perform the assessment for you with the documents you’ve selected. It will do this simultaneously with the summary of the SOC 2 report you’ve collected from the vendor. 

You’ll be able to keep an eye on the progress of your assessment in real time with the progress bar at the top of the assessment window: 

Along the left side, you’ll see the different focus areas of your framework. Next to each section, you’ll also be able to view the number of questions or controls you’re assessing. The AI will work through the assessment to highlight things like whether a response is compliant with your framework, if the vendor meets your control requirements, or if there is a need to review a section further. 

You'll also be able to view the items surfaced in your SOC 2 Summary:

This process is an integrated workflow, which means that as you go along on the Copilot assessment, you can flag questions for further review, create and track issues directly from the platform that auto-populate in your issue management suite, or assign follow-up tasks to your team and the vendor. This all happens within the existing framework of your TPRM process. 

Built-In Trust and Transparency

Whistic AI was built to give you absolute visibility and control. These elements are critical for delivering trustworthy outcomes to truly accelerate your TPRM process. The AI in the platform shows its work (so to speak) so you can take a “trust, but verify” approach and utilize the time-and-cost saving features with greater confidence. 

This is possible because each automated assessment performed by the AI in Assessment Copilot includes these trust-building elements:

• Confidence scores that express the degree of certainty Whistic AI has in its responses. 
• Answer explanations that include further contextual details, so you can understand why Whistic AI responded the way it did. 
• Source visibility that allows you to further validate the automated responses or reference the sources themselves for deeper context.
• Relevance scores to help you understand how closely the sources used in the AI response relate to your control framework

Built-In Vendor Engagement

After the AI assessment is complete and you’ve reviewed the responses, you may notice a few gaps in the level of assessment your business requires for a particular vendor type. At this stage, it may be necessary for the vendor to provide additional information or clarify a flagged response. 

Within the same assessment workflow, you can select each issue or unknown together in bulk to create a customized list of things that the vendor needs to resolve. This is essentially a min-questionnaire built on the fly. This short questionnaire is much easier for the vendor to respond so you can finalize your assessment in a fraction of the time. 

The AI-First Difference for Your TPRM Assessments

This overview provides a bird’s-eye look at an AI-first assessment workflow. By increasing the depth and breadth of assessments and reducing the time and resource investment, this approach makes it possible to dramatically reduce costs and improve risk outcomes. It also liberates you from the manual tasks of questionnaire-driven TPRM workflows.  

Whistic is leading the charge in modernizing TPRM in three important ways:

1. The depth of transparency. By providing the ability to review sources, control the use of AI in the assessment, and collaborate with your vendors to resolve issues directly, Whistic is built on trust that allows you to automate with confidence. 
2. AI-integrated workflows by design. Other platforms view AI as an afterthought to their product—a bell-or-whistle here, an add-on function there. Whistic’s Assessment Copilot was built from the ground up with a seamless AI workflow.
3. Field-tested expertise. Whistic has been ahead of the curve in developing our AI capabilities. We’ve spent the last two years building our AI from the ground up, and our customers have been using the first generation of AI-first workflows since May of 2024. With our latest generation, launched in March 2025, you benefit from our head start with a proven AI solution. 

Of course, the easiest way to understand how an AI-first approach to third-party risk can benefit your business is to see it up close for yourself. This brief primer was just the tip of the iceberg, but we’d love to show you Whistic AI can work for you to reduce costs, reduce risk, and increase efficiency. 

Schedule some time with our team to learn more.