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AI Agents in GRC

  • AI Agents in GRC

  • AI Agents for Security Questionnaires

  • Third party risk review

AI Agents in GRC

What is a GRC AI Agent?

When a company grows past a certain size, every mistake can be very costly. It is common practice to have a dedicated Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) team to ensure that all IT activity complies with best practices and to surface up risks. A GRC AI Agent is an AI Agent that autonomously performs tasks that are typically done by such GRC teams.

What GRC tasks can be performed by AI Agents?

AI Agents can extend the reach of automation to areas that involve reading or writing unstructured text or interacting with humans. Examples are

  1. Policy & Documentation Management: AI can automate policy drafting, version control, and documentation maintenance while ensuring regulatory compliance.
  2. Risk & Compliance Monitoring: Enables continuous risk scanning, automated compliance checks, and real-time monitoring of key risk indicators and regulatory changes.
  3. Audit & Incident Management: Supports audit processes through automated evidence collection, incident detection, and response workflow automation.
  4. Reporting & Analytics: Generates automated reports, maintains dashboards, and provides data visualization for compliance metrics and board reporting.
  5. Training & Third-Party Management: Assists in training material customization, vendor risk assessments, and compliance awareness communications while maintaining audit trails.

How do AI Agents pull live information from my security tools?

An AI Agent may use traditional programming techniques in its flow. Some security tools offer APIs. In such cases, the AI Agent can use that tool’s API to pull or push information. Some legacy tools do not offer APIs. In such cases the agent needs to extract information from screenshots, a classic AI use case.

Can AI Agents help with compliance audits?

Yes AI Agents can speed up several tasks that are needed to sail through a compliance audit.

  1. Security & Control Monitoring: AI can automate security monitoring, access control reviews, and vulnerability assessments while maintaining documentation for SOC-2 requirements.
  2. Availability & Processing: Assists in tracking system uptime, performance metrics, data quality checks, and process monitoring for audit evidence.
  3. Confidentiality & Privacy: Helps manage data classification, privacy controls, consent tracking, and information lifecycle documentation.
  4. Evidence Collection & Documentation: Automates gathering and organizing audit evidence, maintaining control documentation, and tracking policy versions.
  5. Compliance & Reporting: Provides real-time control testing, compliance gap analysis, automated audit reports, and remediation tracking capabilities.

How can I use AI Agents to collect evidence?

There are several aspects of evidence collection that AI Agents can speed up.

  1. Automated Collection: AI can automatically gather evidence like screenshots, logs, configurations, and reports while maintaining proper documentation and validation.
  2. Organization & Processing: Automatically categorizes, tags, and indexes evidence, standardizes formats, extracts data, and creates cross-references.
  3. Evidence Validation: Performs completeness checks, verifies date ranges, validates attributes, and identifies gaps in collected evidence.

AI Agents for Security Questionnaires

What are security questionnaires?

It is common for B2B companies to evaluate security risk of a vendor before they buy products or services from them. They typically do this by sending the vendor a list of questions about their security practices. This is commonly referred to as the “security questionnaire”. The questions vary widely depending on the nature of the vendor’s product or service and the buyer’s concerns.

What is a Trust Center?

Filling security questionnaires takes time. Some vendors deflect that by proactively offering their security policies, certifications, and other information that buyers are typically interested in. They do this via a website, commonly referred to as a Trust Center. Note that a Trust Center does not fully deflect questionnaires. Buyers concerns vary widely depending on their own business and the nature of the vendor’s product and service, and therefore will often send custom questionnaires to the vendor even if the vendor has a Trust Center.

How can AI Agent help fill up security questionnaires?

Yes this is a great use case for AI. The questions in security questionnaires are typically about the vendor’s policies and security posture, current state of their security controls, and product features. AI Agents can synthesize answers to a majority of questions in security questionnaires from documents and APIs at the vendor.

How accurate are AI Agents?

Answering security questionnaires automatically has been an area of product development for multiple years. Earlier generations of products did a simple match of the question with a knowledge base and pulled answers verbatim, and therefore the answers were not accurate.

Advances in AI have changed this game significantly. Simbian’s AI Agents can automatically answer about 90% of questions on average. Just like with human GRC analysts, the quality of the documentation goes a long way. If a vendor supplies the Agent with poor quality policy documents and whitepapers as input, the answers will initially suffer. But the good thing is that the AI Agents learn just like humans do with peer input, and auto-recover from this.

How can I train AI Agents to write just like me?

Yes Simbian’s AI Agents interact with users through natural language. A user can coach it to write answers in their style.

Third party risk review

How can AI Agents help with third party risk review?

Reviewing risks from third parties (vendors) that you depend on involves going through information that is often not amenable to traditional automation.

  1. AI Agents can analyze vendors’ answers to your questionnaires, their compliance certifications, their security policies, whitepapers, product documentation, news, along with structured data available about your vendors, to surface up what matters in your context, and to provide a holistic risk summary.
  2. AI Agents can provide automated risk scoring and assessments.
  3. Vendors’ security status, security incidents, news are evolving continuously. Compliance certifications expire, and new certifications are added. With AI Agents it is now possible to evaluate your vendor on an ongoing basis rather than just once every year.

Can AI Agents review security questionnaires?

Yes this is another great use case for AI Agents. Each vendor uses their own style when responding to your questionnaires. Some write detailed answers, some write compact answers referencing other answers, some use their own terminology. Even for humans who review these questionnaires regularly, it can take hours to review the answers, and to extract the risks in the context of your business. AI Agents can reduce this to minutes.

How can I follow-up on a discrepancy found by AI Agents in questionnaire?

This depends on the nature of the discrepancy.

  1. The vendor may not have answered your question fully. In this case you need to send follow-up questions to the vendor, review their follow-up answers. This is another thing that AI Agents can automate, in addition to the initial review.
  2. The discrepancy may surface up an underlying misunderstanding about the vendor’s capabilities. In this case as the GRC analyst, you will typically follow up with your own business team that depends on the vendor.

Can AI Agents automatically request vendors to resubmit questionnaires?

Yes AI Agents can send and receive emails. They can send new questions or ask the vendor to respond again to the original questionnaire with clarifications. They can then review the new responses and factor that into the holistic risk assessment for the vendor.