Prevalent adds AI-powered enhancements to reduce risk assessment time

Prevalent announced that it added several AI-powered timesaving and threat-sensing enhancements to the Prevalent Third-Party Risk Management Platform, its SaaS solution used by hundreds of organizations around the world to manage, monitor and remediate risks associated with their vendors and suppliers.

“In May, when we published our 2024 Third-Party Risk Management Study, a couple of findings stood out to us,” explained Alastair Parr, Prevalent’s SVP of Global Products and Services. “First, half of the companies we surveyed are still relying on spreadsheets to assess their vendors; and second, 61% are actively investigating use cases for AI in the automation of their TPRM programs. The changes we’re announcing today directly correlate to those findings.”

A key component among the new features is Prevalent’s AI-enabled Auto Assessment Population, which will dramatically reduce the time required to complete risk analyses. Currently, most third-party risk management tools enable users to upload previously completed assessments to populate new ones; however, they run into trouble when the Excel files they have uploaded do not exactly match the new questionnaires’ formatting.

Rather than requiring users to restructure their existing Excel files into a recognized format, the Prevalent TPRM Platform leverages AI to take any completed assessment uploaded as an Excel spreadsheet, analyze key columns and automatically populate a new assessment regardless of formatting differences.

Navigating Prevalent’s TPRM Platform continues to be a simple, fast experience due to enhancements to Alfred—Prevalent’s virtual third-party risk advisor first introduced in October 2023. Using natural language commands, users can engage Alfred directly within the Platform as they would any chatbot-style interface and ask for help navigating to wherever they want to go—risk registers, contracts, survey submissions, vendors, etc. As well, third-party risk teams can manage and compare vendors right from the Alfred interface.

“With Alfred’s updates, Prevalent not only helps customers leverage the power of AI to make sense of large volumes of data and automate risk assessment processes but also simplifies the user experience to ease vendor management and address risk faster,” explained Mr. Parr.

Prevalent has also enhanced a key feature in Vendor Threat Monitor (VTM) that provides customers with deeper insight into their suppliers’ reputational risks. As supply chains and third-party relationships expand globally, so do the risks that organizations face.

However, existing third-party management tools offer only cursory reputational risk info, often delivered in disjointed data feeds. In contrast, Prevalent Vendor Threat Monitor incorporates reputational screening insights natively at both the vendor and individual level, leveraging hundreds of thousands of tracked news sites and company blogs, in conjunction with millions of government records that can help companies better perform pre-contract due diligence and monitor existing vendor relationships.

Prevalent VTM continuously scrutinizes real-time cyber, business, individual, operational, ESG and financial risks, dynamically scoring risks and helping users separate false alarms from red flags.

New integrations within the Prevalent Platform add convenience and added security for users. The latest version of Prevalent Contract Essentials features integration with DocuSign whereby users can send documents of any type within the Platform.

This enhancement differentiates the Prevalent approach to managing third parties throughout the relationship lifecycle by ensuring that all internal and external parties can fully execute and audit vendor and supplier contracts for closed-loop tracking and management.