Security questionnaires have become a standard step in the enterprise buying process and a sticking point for revenue teams. Today’s buyers expect fast, detailed, and audit-ready answers. However, the workflows behind those answers haven’t kept pace. Teams are still manually triaging intake, chasing SMEs for approvals, and copying and pasting answers from scattered documents. The result? Delays, inconsistency, and mounting pressure on proposal teams.
The good news is that AI agents are starting to reshape how this work gets done. Rather than tacking AI onto outdated processes, the highest-performing organizations are embedding intelligent agents across the entire security questionnaire lifecycle. From intake to submission, the impact is real: faster turnarounds, higher accuracy, and significant time savings for SMEs and proposal teams alike.
In this post, you’ll learn how AI agents support each stage of the security questionnaire process, what to look for in a trustworthy solution, and how top teams are using this technology to move faster without sacrificing quality.
Why security questionnaires are so time-consuming
Security questionnaires are no longer a formality. They’ve become a gating requirement in nearly every enterprise buying cycle, and the scope has expanded dramatically. This breakdown of security questionnaires explains what they typically include and why they’ve become so central to enterprise deals.
Organizations are now fielding more questionnaires, with more questions, under tighter deadlines. In regulated industries or enterprise sales, it’s not uncommon for a single questionnaire to span multiple domains from IT and InfoSec to privacy, compliance, and legal.
Several forces are driving this complexity. Buyers are engaging vendors later in the process, expecting more detailed documentation upfront, and involving larger internal review committees.
Nearly 60% of organizations report that buyers are now using AI to evaluate responses — a shift that’s raised the bar for both precision and personalization. At the same time, security and privacy requirements are tightening, and procurement teams are using questionnaires to vet vendors against increasingly stringent regulatory standards. (2025 State of Strategic Response Management (SRM) Report, pg. 8)
Internally, this surge in volume and scrutiny is creating real strain. Teams face aggressive deadlines, unclear ownership, and repeated friction across departments. Proposal managers often triage questions manually, while SMEs are pulled into late-stage reviews with little context, leading to bottlenecks and duplicated efforts, which can result in burnout. When answers live in static spreadsheets, outdated documents, or siloed systems, the result is inconsistent responses, missed deadlines, and unnecessary escalations.
These delays have a business impact. Slow or incomplete responses can disqualify vendors before a deal progresses. Teams that rely on manual formatting and tracking tools spend valuable time on coordination rather than quality or strategy. And without version control, it’s easy to reuse language that no longer reflects the organization’s current security posture — a risk that can trigger additional scrutiny and erode buyer confidence.
Simply put, traditional workflows aren’t built for today’s scale or stakes. As response volumes rise and buyer expectations grow more complex, teams need a more innovative, more structured way to manage the process. That’s where AI agents are helping leading organizations move faster and with greater precision.
Key ways AI agents improve the security questionnaire workflow
AI agents offer targeted improvements in every phase of the security questionnaire lifecycle. From triage to submission, they help teams move faster, respond with greater consistency, and reduce the manual lift on proposal teams and SMEs.
Below is a breakdown of the three most impactful applications of AI agents in the security questionnaire process, including how they change the game.
Intake and classification
Security questionnaires often arrive as large, unstructured documents — spreadsheets, PDFs, or portal forms — with hundreds of questions that span IT, legal, privacy, and compliance domains. Parsing them manually takes time and often leads to routing errors or overlooked questions. AI intake agents simplify this from the start. They scan incoming questionnaires and organize questions by topic, automatically identifying which internal teams should weigh in.
These agents also flag unclear or non-standard questions that may need early SME input. Instead of waiting until the end of the review cycle to chase clarifications, proposal teams can surface those items at the beginning, preventing delays that otherwise arise during final reviews.
By providing structure upfront, AI intake agents reduce internal triage time and make it easier for proposal managers to scope the effort involved. This enables better prioritization and more transparent communication with contributors. When volume is high or resources are constrained, automated categorization ensures no question slips through the cracks.
First-draft answer generation
The majority of security questionnaire responses are drawn from content that has already been written and approved — things like encryption protocols, access controls, or risk management frameworks. Still, many organizations spend hours rephrasing the same answers for each new request. AI agents change that. These agents generate first drafts using your pre-approved content, pulling from a centralized knowledge base like the Responsive Knowledge Base.
Because they're trained to recognize and reuse existing language, these agents reduce repetitive work and maintain consistency across responses. Agents don’t guess; instead, they generate answers based on your trusted sources. As SMEs and reviewers provide feedback, the agent learns from those inputs, improving future drafts and reducing the need for repeated edits. For better results, teams are also developing prompt strategies that align with their tone and structure preferences.
This is especially helpful in security questionnaires, where precise wording matters. Proposal teams can avoid reintroducing outdated or noncompliant language, and SMEs can spend more time reviewing and less time rewriting. The result is faster, more reliable first drafts that reflect your organization’s current security posture.
Routing and approvals
Once answers are drafted, AI workflow agents step in to manage the review process. These agents assign tasks, send reminders, and keep the review cycle moving, helping teams to avoid missed deadlines or last-minute scrambles. For high-stakes security questionnaires, where multiple SMEs and compliance stakeholders need to weigh in, this transparent coordination is critical.
In parallel, submission agents ensure that final responses are formatted correctly, checked for compliance, and delivered through the appropriate channel — whether that’s a vendor portal, spreadsheet, or secured file transfer. This is a significant time-saver, especially when buyers request specific formats or strict versioning protocols.
All activity is logged, creating a complete audit trail with version history, timestamps, and approver records. This provides helpful internal oversight and is often required to demonstrate due diligence in heavily regulated industries. With AI handling coordination and formatting, teams reduce errors, accelerate submissions, and ensure governance — all without increasing headcount.
What to look for in an AI-powered solution
If you’re evaluating security questionnaire tools with AI capabilities, look for more than mere automation. The most effective solutions combine intelligence, usability, and oversight:
- Pre-trained AI agents that support intake, answer drafting, and delivery
- Secure access to a centralized knowledge base with version control
- Role-based workflows for SME review and approval
- Compliance-grade infrastructure with audit logging
- Explainable AI that keeps humans in the loop
- Customizable tone, formatting, and structure based on buyer expectations
These capabilities create the foundation for trust, speed, and consistency. They also allow your team to scale its impact without sacrificing accuracy, which is critical in high-stakes buying cycles. For more detailed guidance on AI evaluation and deployment, download the AI Handbook for Strategic Response Management.
How high-performing teams are using AI agents
The most successful teams have gone beyond experimenting with AI — they’ve made it an integral part of how they work. For example, Microsoft’s Proposal Center of Excellence built a centralized content hub of over 20,000 proposal resources, layered on AI-powered search, and reduced time spent answering each question by 30 minutes on average. The result? More time for strategic work and better alignment across global teams.
Organizations that have fully deployed AI agents across their revenue functions are 6x more likely to report significant revenue growth. They're also 3x more likely to use AI for complex, decision-support tasks like go/no-go evaluation and win/loss analysis. (2025 State of Strategic Response Management (SRM) Report, pg. 32-33)
In short, AI isn’t replacing teams, but it is making them faster, more strategic, and more consistent.
Tips for successful adoption
Getting started with AI agents doesn’t require a complete overhaul — it requires planning. Here are a few ways to set your team up for success:
- Don’t over-automate too quickly. Start with repeatable tasks like intake and drafting
- Define roles clearly so team members understand where humans and AI add the most value
- Govern your content to ensure the right inputs power your AI
- Track early wins to build momentum and justify further investment
- Involve SMEs and reviewers early in the design process to encourage buy-in
Getting started: Next steps
If your team is still relying on manual workflows, the fastest way to improve is by centralizing your content. Start with a searchable, governed knowledge base like the Responsive Knowledge Base.
Next, define your review and approval workflows. Clarify which steps require human input and which can be handled by AI. Then, deploy an AI agent — like Responsive’s security questionnaire software — to generate first drafts and manage delivery.
Finally, monitor performance over time. Track KPIs like answer reuse, turnaround time, and SME hours saved to prove ROI and refine your approach.
To see what this all looks like in practice, explore Responsive’s security questionnaire software. You can also see how automation changes the security questionnaire process in previous blog posts, which discuss six processes before and after automation and speeding up security questionnaires with automation.