Automation Can Break Your Cyber Risk Program
Third Party Podcast: What You Should NEVER Automate
Introduction
Everyone wants more automation. The boardroom wants the cost savings, and risk teams want a way to manage 5,000 vendors with a team of three. But the most dangerous thing you can do in a risk program is automate a process you don't actually understand. When you automate a broken process, you don't get efficiency. You just get faster failure.
In the latest episode of Third Party, hosts Jeffrey Wheatman, Bob Maley, and Ferhat Dikbiyik tear down the industry obsession with "turning it on and walking away." If your TPRM strategy relies on a black-box tool to make final decisions, you aren't managing risk. You are delegating your accountability to an algorithm that doesn't have its neck on the line when a breach occurs.
AI Speed vs. Control
Automation is a force multiplier, but it multiplies whatever you feed it. If you feed it a broken, manual questionnaire process, it will simply generate bad data at scale. Many organizations are rushing to implement AI-driven questionnaire tools that "learn" from previous answers.
The problem? Those previous answers are often fundamentally flawed or "fudged" by a sales engineer trying to close a deal. Automating the ingestion of bad data doesn't make you more secure. It creates a false sense of confidence that leaves you wide open to the multipolar entrapment dilemma, a cycle where everyone adopts a tool because they think their competitors are doing it, even if the collective outcome is a race to the bottom.
Humans Must Own the Nuance
There is a misguided belief that AI can replace first-line review. It cannot. AI can significantly improve the speed and quality of a review, but "replace" is a dangerous word. Risk management requires human judgment and traceability.
Consider the "hallucination" factor. LLMs are designed to satisfy the user, not necessarily to provide the objective truth. If an LLM doesn't know the answer to a specific control question, it may guess to remain "helpful." Without a human in the loop to perform a gut check, those guesses become the "truth" in your risk dashboard. If you can’t trace exactly why a decision was made, you have no defensibility when things go sideways.
AI Closes the Gap Between Scores and Reality
Black Kite’s new research into over 200,000 vendors highlights a startling rating paradox, where AI can work in your favor. While the average cyber hygiene score across the ecosystem sits at a seemingly healthy 90.27 (A), more than half (53.77%) of those same companies have at least one critical vulnerability detected and an average Ransomware Susceptibility Index® (RSI™) at 0.378, teetering on the edge of the high-risk 0.4 threshold where attack probability jumps significantly. And the picture looks worse for the top 50 most shared vendors.
- Concentration Risk: The top 50 most shared vendors create outsized systemic exposure.
- The Credential Crisis: 62% of the top 50 vendors had corporate credentials exposed in stealer logs.
- Ransomware Risk: The top 50 vendors have a lower Average Cyber Grade of 83.9 (B),: Despite their scale and resources, the "Elite 50" maintain a lower average cyber grade of 83.9 (B) than the general ecosystem, and a 0.465 Average RSI™, which puts them well within the high-danger zone of being 11.6x more likely to experience a ransomware attack than those below 0.2.
These numbers prove that a static score is not a substitute for real-time intelligence. Automation should be used to flag specific signals, like KEV-listed vulnerabilities and RSI spikes, but a human must still interpret what that means for the specific business relationship. (Read more about the state of TPRM in our 2026 Third-Party Breach Report.)
What to Automate (And What to Guard)
ITo build a resilient program, you must be surgical about where you remove the human element.
Safely Automate | Never Fully Automate |
|---|---|
Data collection and alert ingestion | Final "Go/No-Go" risk decisions |
Workflow notifications and routing | Interpretation of nuanced security exceptions |
Repetitive evidence gathering | Accountability for the final sign-off |
Low-level technical hygiene checks | The "Gut Check" on conflicting data points |
Stop Moving Blindly with a Solution You Can Trust
The goal of TPRM automation is not to walk away from the desk. It is to clear the noise so you can actually do the job you were hired for: making informed, high-stakes decisions about who your company trusts.
If you are automating just to keep up with the volume, you are creating new blind spots. Bottom Line: Don't automate for the sake of "best practice." Automate for the sake of better decisions. If your tools can't tell you why they flagged a vendor, the tool itself is the risk.
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Next Time on Third Party
Your vendor list is exploding, and chances are, you have no idea who is actually plugged into your network. Shadow IT isn't just about a stray Dropbox account anymore. It's a massive ecosystem of third parties that most teams have completely lost track of. In our next episode, our experts unpack the reality of Vendor Sprawl and how the best programs are regaining control.
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