Automating Vendor Forms: My Friday Afternoon Hack

Automating Vendor Forms with AI: How IRIS Transforms Friday Afternoons

It was a Friday afternoon, and like many Fridays, there was a stack of vendor forms awaiting completion. This time, there were five different forms sitting in the queue — each one formatted differently and each one demanding hours of repetitive typing. For anyone who’s ever worked in sales engineering, compliance, or vendor management, this scenario is all too familiar.

What made this time different was that it was the first time our team faced such extensive vendor documentation requests since launching the company. And it was also the first time I truly got to “eat our own dog food” by relying on IRIS, our AI-powered RFP and security questionnaire automation platform, to take on the heavy lifting.

Preparing the Knowledge Base for Automation

Fortunately, our internal instance of IRIS was already set up with strong source documentation, covering all the essentials needed for vendor due diligence and compliance forms. Instead of starting from scratch, we had a comprehensive knowledge foundation ready to go, including:

• Vendor Information: Legal name, address, banking, and wire transfer details automatically exported from Mercury, our banking partner.
• Security Documentation: Our Business Continuity Plan (BCP), Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP), and additional compliance data synced directly from Drata via our integration.
• Product Information: Detailed feature descriptions, benefits, and technical specs uploaded from previously completed proposals and customer-facing documents.

By having these elements centralized and accessible, IRIS could instantly reference accurate, pre-approved data to populate the responses — cutting hours of manual searching and copy-pasting.

The Challenge: Different Formats, Same Pain

Like usual, each vendor document came in a different format — PDFs, Word docs, CSVs, and Excel spreadsheets. This is one of the biggest pain points for anyone managing RFPs, DDQs, or vendor onboarding forms: not only are the questions repetitive, but every buyer seems to package them differently.

Traditionally, this leads to inefficiency and frustration. Teams waste valuable hours retyping the same answers into different templates instead of focusing on strategy, customer conversations, or solution design.

But with IRIS, those formatting differences posed no challenge. Our large language models (LLMs) extracted questions directly from the documents with ease, normalizing the setup process no matter how the vendor forms were structured.

The IRIS Difference: Automated Responses in Real Time

Here’s where the true power of AI-driven RFP and vendor form automation came to life:

• IRIS began drafting answers to each question in real time.
• Every response was backed by linked sources, so reviewers could easily confirm accuracy and compliance.
• Questions requiring nuance or customization were assigned automatically to the right team members for review.

All of this happened while I was writing this very blog post — demonstrating just how seamlessly AI can work in the background to eliminate repetitive tasks that normally consume an entire afternoon.

Why This Matters for Sales, Compliance, and Vendor Management

This experience highlights exactly why AI-powered automation is transforming pre-sales, compliance, and vendor management processes. Instead of spending hours buried in repetitive, manual data entry, teams can:

• Accelerate vendor onboarding by completing forms faster and with fewer errors.
• Ensure compliance accuracy by pulling data directly from verified sources like Drata and Mercury.
• Free up sales engineers and proposal managers to focus on strategic, revenue-driving activities.
• Deliver consistency across every RFP, security questionnaire, and vendor form — regardless of format.

In today’s competitive B2B environment, where speed and accuracy can make or break a deal, automating vendor forms is no longer just a convenience. It’s a necessity.

Final Thoughts

What used to be a dreaded, repetitive Friday afternoon task has now become a quick, automated workflow thanks to IRIS. Our AI platform takes messy, inconsistent vendor forms and turns them into a streamlined process — extracting questions, generating accurate responses, and assigning tasks for review with zero friction.

The result? Hours saved, errors eliminated, and a much better use of valuable team time.

If your team is still struggling with repetitive vendor forms, security questionnaires, or RFPs, it’s time to see what AI-driven automation with IRIS can do.

🚀 Learn more about how IRIS transforms compliance and pre-sales workflows at heyiris.ai.

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