Stop Assessing Vendors. Start Managing Risk: The Next Generation of TPCRM

For years, third-party cyber risk management followed a familiar playbook: tier your vendors (or not), send questionnaires (or not), review compliance evidence (or not), assign a score (or not), remediate the findings (or not), and repeat the process next year (or not). That model wasn't designed for today's world. Third-party ecosystems are larger, more interconnected, and more critical to operations. Threats evolve continuously. Nth-party dependencies can create risks organizations don't even know they have. AI is accelerating both sides of the equation: attackers use it, and defenders can increasingly use it to respond to risk at a scale that wasn't previously possible. Next-generation TPCRM must move beyond periodic assessments and compliance exercises toward continuous, intelligence-driven risk management. That means combining business context with threat intelligence, understanding which third parties actually matter to the organization, identifying emerging exposures before they become incidents, quantifying potential business impact, and giving security teams information they can act on rather than another dashboard full of scores. In this fast-paced session, Jeffrey Wheatman will examine how TPCRM is evolving from questionnaires to ratings to risk intelligence, where AI fits into that transformation, and why traditional approaches aren't disappearing entirely, but need to become inputs rather than the program itself. Attendees will leave with a practical blueprint for modernizing TPCRM without ripping out everything they've already built. The goal isn't more data. It's knowing which third party could hurt you, how badly, and what you're going to do about it.