Elevating the Standard for Third-Party Risk: How Compunnel Uses AI to Scale Advisory Excellence

The Vision: Redefining High-Stakes Cybersecurity Advisory

Compunnel is a global technology and cybersecurity advisory firm trusted by 23% of the Fortune 500 across banking, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, and government sectors. Led by Sakshi Porwal, Global CISO & Cybersecurity Consulting Practice Head, Compunnel’s GRC practice delivers vendor risk assessments, security strategy, and compliance advisory to enterprises navigating highly complex regulatory environments.

For Compunnel, third-party risk management (TPRM) is a core client deliverable. In the high-stakes world of enterprise advisory, every assessment has the client's name on it, and every finding must hold up under the intense scrutiny of audit committees, executive boards, and federal regulators.

The Challenge: The Advisory Scaling Dilemma

Delivering bespoke, rigorous vendor risk assessments comes with immense pressure. Compunnel’s team faced several interconnected challenges that threatened to throttle their growth:

• The Manual Toll on Strategic Time: Advisors were spending countless hours on operational grind—hunting down SOC 2 reports from trust centers, parsing public disclosures, chasing vendors for missing data, and manually formatting findings. This administrative burden cannibalized hours meant for strategic advisory.

• The Scaling Trade-Off: As assessment volume grew, so did the delivery burden. For a consulting practice, this traditionally means either absorbing massive delivery overhead (hiring dozens of analysts) or watching turnaround times slip. Compunnel refused to compromise on speed or costs to achieve scale.

• Consistency Across 186+ Assessments: Maintaining absolute rigor across hundreds of assessments, spanning entirely different industries and regulatory frameworks, is notoriously difficult.

• Vendor Friction and Alert Fatigue: The team struggled with verifying vendor claims, managing alert fatigue from high-volume public vulnerabilities (like those from Microsoft or Google), and distinguishing true supply chain threats from false positives.

The Solution: Autonomous AI Agents for TPRM

To break the scaling bottleneck, Compunnel deployed Zania's autonomous AI agents. This wasn't a standard software implementation; it was a fundamental workflow transformation. Zania shifted Compunnel's assessment delivery from a manual, time-intensive undertaking to an automated, evidence-backed operation.

"What impressed me was how far it goes beyond surface-level monitoring. I haven’t seen another tool get that specific, actually flagging when a certificate or pen test report has expired."

— Sakshi Porwal, Compunnel

Rigor at Scale Across Frameworks

For every client engagement, Zania's AI agents execute the heavy lifting:

1. Intelligent Scoping: Agents automatically tier vendors based on business context and data criticality.

2. Autonomous Evidence Hunting: Agents retrieve documentation directly from vendor trust centers, regulatory filings, and public threat intelligence sources without human intervention.

3. Targeted Interrogation: Rather than sending generic 100-question spreadsheets, agents generate dynamic questionnaires specifically tailored to close remaining control gaps.

4. Real-Time Vendor Follow-Up: Agents autonomously handle back-and-forth communication, asking clarifying questions about control gaps in real-time.

Defensible, Audit-Ready Outputs

Zania produces structured, evidence-cited reports ready for client delivery. Instead of spending days assembling rough drafts, Compunnel’s advisors receive outputs featuring:

• Granular, control-by-control assessments with confidence levels.

• 100% traceability with cited findings and source references.

• Clear risk justifications and actionable remediation recommendations.

Continuous Vendor Monitoring

Risk is not a point-in-time snapshot. Zania's agents continuously monitor vendors post-assessment for breach announcements, expired certifications, bankruptcy filings, and new locations in sanctioned countries.

The Results: Advisors Back to Advising

By partnering with Zania, Compunnel has cemented its reputation as a forward-thinking leader in the GRC advisory space. The impact has been immediate and quantifiable:

• 186 Assessments Delivered Flawlessly: Each assessment met Compunnel's exacting standards, featuring thorough evidence trails and defensible conclusions, regardless of the client's industry or framework complexity.

• Up to 10x Faster Reporting: Zania reduced the time required to move from initial vendor assessment to client-ready reporting from days to hours.

• Unyielding Consistency: Evidence review and gap identification became standardized, ensuring the 186th assessment possessed the same rigor as the first.

Most importantly, Compunnel fundamentally shifted how its highly skilled team spends their time.

"We're an advisory firm. Our value is in our judgment, not in spending hours reviewing PDFs. Zania takes that heavy lifting off our plate so the team can stay focused on the higher-value work."

— Sakshi Porwal, Compunnel