From Long Hours to Instant Insights: The Case for Automating Third-Party Evidence Review

5 minute read

August 2025

by Sophia Corsetti

Third-party risk teams face a growing challenge. As the volume and complexity of third-party assessments increases, so does the burden of reviewing evidence. Documents such as SOC 2 reports, SIG questionnaires, and internal security policies must be analyzed in detail before a third party can pass a yearly review cycle.

While these documents are critical to understanding a third party’s security posture, the process of reviewing them continues to be one of the most time-consuming and resource-intensive aspects of the third-party risk management (TPRM) lifecycle.

At ProcessUnity, we invested in understanding how our customers can solve this challenge with an innovative application of AI. In this guide to fixing the evidence review problem, we examine why the evidence review process is unsustainable, and how purpose-built AI is now making it possible to automate and accelerate this critical task without compromising accuracy or control.

Evidence Review: A Critical Step with a Heavy Burden

Third-party risk evidence plays a critical role in validating a vendor’s controls during the assessment cycle. Documentation is the only way you can verify that third-party security controls are in place, ensuring that your business partners are as secure as your internal team. But the current approach to evidence review is often inconsistent, inefficient, and difficult to scale.

Today’s TPRM teams routinely encounter the following challenges:

  • SOC 2 reports require detailed, manual analysis to identify key third-party security controls and potential gaps.
  • SIG questionnaires contain minimal context, requiring analysts to interpret and score them manually.
  • Security policy documents vary in structure and quality, demanding subjective judgment and back-and-forth clarification.

These challenges result in long review times, inconsistent evaluations across different analysts, and delayed assessment cycles. The manual nature of the process makes it difficult for teams to keep up, especially as the number of assessments grows and the regulatory landscape becomes more complex.

The Problem with Manual Review

Manual review is slow and inherently subjective. Different analysts may interpret the same evidence in different ways. Some may conduct thorough reviews, while others may focus only on surface-level indicators due to time constraints. This lack of standardization can lead to uneven scoring, missed security issues, and limited auditability.

More importantly, as the volume of assessments increases, TPRM teams must make difficult trade-offs: prioritize speed or maintain depth. Either approach introduces risk.

A Better Way Forward

An effective third-party evidence review process should be:

  1. Efficient: Your team should minimize time spent on low-value administrative work.
  2. Accurate: Review cycles should surface key controls, gaps, and risks with reliability.
  3. Consistent: Your reviews need to apply a standard assessment methodology across each and every third party.
  4. Actionable: Third-party reviews must deliver results that can immediately inform decision-making.

The industry has long needed a better solution that accelerates review cycles while improving the quality and consistency of results.

The Role of AI in TPRM

Generic AI solutions lack the necessary domain knowledge to interpret evidence documents accurately. Without a clear understanding of security frameworks, risk terminology, and contextual relevance, general-purpose AI may deliver unreliable or incomplete results. Concerns about privacy, data handling, and tool integration slowed the adoption of AI in critical risk functions.

While the potential benefits of artificial intelligence are substantial, many teams remain skeptical of giving up human control over the review process. At ProcessUnity, we believe AI can play a transformative role in third-party risk management, but only if it is designed specifically for the challenges third-party risk professionals face, and supports the human-in-the-loop.

Introducing Evidence Evaluator: Purpose-Built AI for TPRM

To directly address the challenges of manual, time-consuming evidence review, ProcessUnity delivered Evidence Evaluator, an AI-powered capability embedded within our platform, designed specifically for real-world third-party risk management teams.

Evidence Evaluator leverages advanced AI to automate the extraction and analysis of content from commonly submitted third-party documents, such as:

  • Statement of Controls Reports (SOC 1, SOC 2, etc.)
  • Certifications (ISO27001, etc.)
  • Completed Questionnaires (SIG Core, SIG Light, etc.)
  • Compliance Attestations (GDPR, CCPA, etc.)
  • Information Security Policies & Procedures
  • Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery Plans

The powerful tool reads and interprets these documents, identifies relevant security controls, maps them to industry frameworks or custom scoring models, and summarizes key findings. When producing summaries of third-party evidence documents, Evidence Evaluator also includes the specific document and page location where a given response was found. In doing so, it replaces hours of manual review with actionable insights generated in seconds, all while maintaining transparency and auditability.

Rather than serving as a separate tool or bolt-on, Evidence Evaluator is fully integrated into the ProcessUnity platform, enabling a seamless assessment solution. Whether an analyst is reviewing third-party evidence submitted through the Exchange, or evidence uploaded internally during an assessment, Evidence Evaluator integrates directly into the existing process, eliminating the need to toggle between systems or manually input findings.

Solving Real Challenges with Intelligence and Scale

We built Evidence Evaluator with direct input from our customers, who helped us walk through the tests and verification steps to ensure program results are accurate and deliver the most value. Together, we created a solution that delivers immediate, measurable improvements to the evidence review process.

Some example key use cases for where to apply Evidence Evaluator include:

  • Parsing SOC 2 reports to extract control statements, identify relevant risks, and pinpoint any exceptions or deficiencies.
  • Scoring SIG questionnaires quickly and consistently, even when responses are vague or incomplete.
  • Mapping evidence directly to assessment frameworks such as ISO, NIST, or internal control libraries for precise alignment and gap analysis.

With these capabilities, risk teams can reduce review cycles from days to minutes while significantly improving consistency across analysts and assessments. The solution also enables programs to scale in order to handle a greater volume of assessments without requiring an increase in staff or hours.

Evidence Evaluator reinforces ProcessUnity’s broader product strategy, bringing practical, trusted AI capabilities into the third-party risk lifecycle in meaningful, secure ways that align with how our customers actually work.

See Evidence Evaluator in Action

If your team is experiencing delays, inconsistencies, or resource strain due to manual evidence review, we invite you to see what is possible with purpose-built AI. ProcessUnity is committed to helping risk teams move faster, make smarter decisions, and build more resilient third-party relationships. With Evidence Evaluator, we deliver on that promise.

You can watch our on-demand webinar to see a demonstration of the capabilities included with Evidence Evaluator. We walk through real-world use cases, show how the solution integrates into your existing workflow, and share insights into what’s next for AI at ProcessUnity.

For a personalized walkthrough of ProcessUnity and the AI-TPRM technology we offer, schedule a demo with our team.

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About Us

ProcessUnity is a leading provider of cloud-based applications for risk and compliance management. The company’s software as a service (SaaS) platform gives organizations the control to assess, measure, and mitigate risk and to ensure the optimal performance of key business processes. ProcessUnity’s flagship solution, ProcessUnity Vendor Risk Management, protects companies and their brands by reducing risks from third-party vendors and suppliers. ProcessUnity helps customers effectively and efficiently assess and monitor both new and existing vendors – from initial due diligence and onboarding through termination. Headquartered outside of Boston, Massachusetts, ProcessUnity is used by the world’s leading financial service firms and commercial enterprises. For more information, visit www.processunity.com.