If you’re on the frontlines of your organization’s cybersecurity department, you’ve likely found yourself burdened by security questionnaires. Whether you’re in charge of evaluating vendor responses or completing questionnaires yourself, it’s no secret these requests can be time-consuming for everyone involved.
Well, what if this didn’t have to be the case? What if a solution could finally allow you to streamline the questionnaire process and free yourself and your team members to focus on more strategic initiatives?
This article explores why traditional, manual security questionnaire processes are no longer sustainable and explains how UpGuard Trust Exchange and its powerful artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities can empower security teams to overcome this enduring hurdle once and for all.
The time sink of manual questionnaires
In many ways, security questionnaires are a necessary evil. These structured documents, often required for third-party risk management (TPRM), compliance audits, and requests for proposal (RFP) responses, help organizations evaluate their vendors and other third-party partners to ensure they meet their security, privacy, and compliance requirements. However, many organizations still complete them manually, making them tedious and overwhelming.
“The worst questionnaire experience I’ve had required me to answer 1,500+ questions and upload 100+ pieces of evidence, which took over 40 hours to complete.” - Val Dobrushkin, Director of Technologies at Akamai Technologies
Depending on the scope of the relationship, a questionnaire can contain a few dozen to several hundred questions. Answering these questions becomes tedious because they often repeat across different questionnaires. Team members must spend valuable time retrieving the same information, double-checking answers, and formatting them in each questionnaire's required format.
For many security teams, questionnaires have become a time sink they simply can’t afford. Additionally, as the number of third-party vendors or RFPs increases, the number of questionnaires organizations need to complete or review multiplies. Security teams often find themselves stretched too thin, spending more time on administrative tasks than critical security initiatives. This inefficiency isn’t just costly in terms of time—it can also lead to burnout, decreased job satisfaction, and increased risk of error.
Furthermore, this cumbersome process isn’t just frustrating for security teams. It’s also painful for Sales and Procurement, as delays in completing security questionnaires can hold up contracts, halt onboarding, lose potential deals, and create unnecessary friction between departments. Finding ways to reduce the burden of completing security questionnaires is essential for companies aiming to close deals and onboard vendors quickly while maintaining a strong security posture.
Some organizations receive nearly 1,000 security questionnaires every year (UpGuard customer data).
Harnessing AI to solve questionnaire problems
Artificial intelligence has emerged as the leading solution for helping security teams manage the burden of security questionnaires. By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, AI enables teams to focus on high-level strategic activities without sacrificing accuracy or compliance.
AI can streamline the questionnaire process by recognizing frequently asked questions, learning from past responses, and leveraging security documentation to complete repetitive sections instantly. This technology drastically reduces the time and effort spent on questionnaires while delivering key benefits:
- Speed: AI questionnaire tools can complete tasks in a fraction of the time it would take a team manually. What used to take weeks or months can now be done in hours, easing the workload, speeding up deal cycles, and accelerating vendor onboarding.
- Precision: AI tools can pull from a repository of pre-approved answers, ensuring fields are auto-filled with the correct information every time.
- Accuracy: AI ensures greater response consistency by reducing the risk of human error. Many AI tools cross-reference previously completed questionnaires to ensure alignment with an organization’s security policies, preventing mistakes like misinterpretation or inconsistent answers.
Despite these advancements, not all AI tools are created equal. The following sections explore three levels of AI assistance—from more basic DIY solutions to fully integrated, AI-powered platforms like UpGuard’s Trust Exchange, which represents the gold standard in automating security questionnaires.
Acceptable solution: DIY AI
Custom AI solutions are becoming a growing trend in the cybersecurity industry as security teams search for ways to reduce the burden of security questionnaires. These custom solutions typically involve training large language models (LLMs) on all the documentation an organization shares with a third party, such as previous security questionnaires or compliance certificates. While this may seem innovative, DIY AI models also present considerable risks.
Exposing AI to sensitive information and protected data during training can pose significant privacy and security concerns. There’s also the risk of incorrect or inconsistent answers if security teams don’t thoroughly or adequately train the AI system to understand all contextual data in every situation. Even the most well-trained models can fall prey to AI hallucinations, where the model generates a response that seems plausible but is, in fact, factually inaccurate.
Maintaining an in-house AI solution also requires tremendous ongoing effort. Organizations that create their own AI must continue training, retraining, and testing their model to ensure answers stay accurate as regulations and security standards evolve. For many security teams, this approach is too resource-intensive to manage effectively, and DIY AI can introduce unnecessary complexity into an already cumbersome and complicated process.
Good solution: AI tools
Over the last few years, various AI tools have entered the market, promising to make security questionnaires easier to complete. Companies like Vanta, SafeBase, and Responsive all offer tools and add-ons to automate the security questionnaire process. These solutions can be highly effective for large organizations with a substantial IT and security budget.
However, these tools are often too expensive for smaller security teams. Budget-constrained teams are often left without a viable solution, forcing them to rely again on manual processes simply because they can’t afford the tools designed to help with this problem.
This predicament can leave security questionnaires frustrated and disillusioned at the prospect of ever improving their security questionnaire process. After all, if the price of these solutions is significantly out of budget and this budget isn’t going to change anytime soon, they will likely feel stuck in a cycle of inefficiency with no realistic path forward to streamline their workflow. But this doesn’t have to be the case.
Better solution: UpGuard Trust Exchange
For organizations seeking a comprehensive, cost-effective solution to overcome the burden of security questionnaires, UpGuard Trust Exchange is the best choice. Simple and efficient, the platform combines powerful AI, automation, and intuitive workflows to eliminate the tedious, manual tasks that drain a security team’s resources.
Unlike other AI tools with steep price tags, UpGuard Trust Exchange is available for free. This accessibility enables security teams of all sizes to overcome the security questionnaire burden, even those operating on a limited budget. Trust Exchange provides everything security teams need to streamline their questionnaire process without breaking the bank.
Trust Exchange’s powerful Questionnaire AI can automate repetitive questions, pull from pre-approved responses, and allow teams to store, share, and manage security documentation in one centralized hub. By using Trust Exchange, security teams will reduce the time they spend completing questionnaires, minimize the potential for human error, and ensure greater accuracy and consistency across requests.
“Trust Exchange’s Questionnaire AI is a game-changer for our team. It automatically and accurately fills 75% of any security questionnaire we receive. This saves us several hours every week.” - Chris O’Brien, UpGuard
How UpGuard Trust Exchange stands out
Tens of thousands of companies worldwide have already adopted UpGuard Trust Exchange to streamline security questionnaires, reduce response times, and improve customer relationships. Trust Exchange includes the following powerful features:
- Questionnaire AI: Answer security questionnaires in minutes, not weeks. Trust Exchanges’s Questionnaire AI uses artificial intelligence to power features like Autofill and Enhance, easing the burden of security questionnaires for all teams involved, from Security and Sales to Procurement and Compliance.
- Autofill: Reduce your workload. Autofill enables users to auto-populate security questionnaires from a repository of their past answers and stored documents and certifications.
- Enhance: Eliminate typos and improve response quality. Enhance helps users edit and refine their answers, minimizing human error and making responses more consistent and faster to assess.
- Trust Page: Showcase your security documentation and share it with other organizations. An organization’s Trust Page represents a comprehensive display of its security posture, including its security rating, security contact, company description, featured questionnaires, and any supporting documentation or certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001, etc.).
- Content Library: Manage your security documents in one place and control which documents should be shared externally with your customers and prospective customers.
“Instead of having to email back and forth with a prospect, you send a link with your Trust Page, and in 30 seconds, the customer has most of their security questions answered. Multiply that with 150 sales reps, and you save dozens of hours of valuable time from the sales reps, and then those reps can reach out to more customers.” - Julien Penalba, Director of Information Security at iDeals
Trust Exchange’s enhanced Questionnaire AI
Designed to help security professionals work smarter, Trust Exchange is continuously evolving to offer new capabilities that make the security questionnaire process even more efficient. One of the platform’s latest advancements allows security teams to upload and leverage PDF documents, such as a SOC 2 report, penetration test, information security policy, and other vital security evidence.
This enhancement to Trust Exchange’s Questionnaire AI enables the platform to pull information directly from these documents, further automating questionnaire completion and reducing the need for manual data entry. By utilizing previously completed reports and certifications, security teams can dramatically reduce response times while ensuring accuracy and consistency across all questionnaires.
In combination with Trust Exchange’s existing features—such as Autofill and Enhance—this new PDF integration cements UpGuard Trust Exchange as the ultimate tool for overcoming the security questionnaire burden. Remember, it’s not just about improving your response times; it’s about developing smarter, more streamlined workflows that empower your security team to focus on strategic initiatives rather than getting bogged down in paperwork.
