This post is part of G2's 2025 digital trends series. Read more about G2’s perspective on digital transformation trends in an introduction from Tim Sanders, VP, research insights, and additional coverage on trends identified by G2’s analysts.
AI feature integrations in security compliance products will fuel an increase in compliance-vetted software purchases.
G2’s 2024 Buyer Behavior Report revealed that although 81% of software buyers claimed to consider security incidents when making purchases, 48% of the same group of surveyed buyers admitted to closing deals without their vendor of choice completing a security or privacy assessment.
Buyers often face a dilemma: either disrupt business operations by ensuring that their chosen vendor is security and privacy-compliant or settle for a product and quickly return to business as usual.
The inclusion of AI within security compliance products, however, will make it easier for buyers to confirm third-party software vendors’ security and privacy compliance, resulting in safer product selections and ultimately closing this 33% gap in buyer desires vs. behaviors.
Security and privacy compliance products use AI to fill out security questionnaires, map and analyze data, and streamline compliance workflow activities. This automation reduces workloads for vendor information security (InfoSec) teams or strongly advises vendor organizations that do not have dedicated security analysts in-house. As a result, compliance tools integrated with AI features reduce time to return on investment (ROI).
OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in late November 2022 is widely credited with fueling the AI boom. Since then, AI has been integrated into all varieties of software, but not every product. This has created a divide between security compliance products that do and do not incorporate generative AI within their products.
By comparing the time to ROI between security compliance products that do and do not use AI since December 2022, software users report that products that incorporate AI have a faster ROI. The graph below illustrates that these products have an ROI of 11.6 months, while their non-AI-integrated competitors have an ROI of 12.6 months.
Software buyers claim to consider a vendor’s history of security incidents yet are often willing to close deals without their vendor of choice demonstrating their compliance with regulatory standards.
The dichotomy reported among buyers in G2’s 2024 Buyer Behavior report between their willingness to forgo security while claiming security to be a purchasing factor has created a problem for vendors. To meet buyers’ desires, vendors ought to secure compliance credentials. While they are securing buyers’ desired credentials, however, their competitors may be closing deals with that 48% of buyers who admitted to purchasing unvetted software.
The time a vendor must take to complete a thorough compliance audit can limit potential sales and disrupt their operations. However, generative AI’s integration with security and privacy compliance tools has already begun to shorten vendors’ reported ROI because AI features in compliance products make securing credentials easier and faster. This trend will accelerate and reduce the gap among buyers who claim to care about vendor compliance while closing deals without their vendor of choice completing an assessment.
The reduced time to ROI demonstrates increased value for security and privacy compliance products when integrated with generative AI. In 2025, an increasing number of compliance products will continue to integrate these capabilities into their platforms, helping a larger number of third-party software vendors complete self-administered compliance audits.
Additionally, compliance products already integrated with AI will build upon already powerful features as generative AI continues to outpace other methods of information gathering, data classification, and workflow administration. Vendors’ investments in AI-integrated compliance products will shorten the time to ROI due to those features’ abilities to make certification easier and, therefore, drive more sales, meeting buyers’ reported security desires.
In other words, vendor demand for AI-integrated compliance products will surge in order to sate buyers’ appetites for purchasing vetted products.
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This article is co-written by Lauren Worth, G2 market research analyst, privacy, security, and GRC.
Edited by Supanna Das
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