Agent Hours, Not Human Weeks: Konfer Action Plan for Startups for Responding to Security Assessments & RFQs

We are on the brink of another great transformation. For centuries, human labor defined progress: the Anthropocene Age. Today, we stand at the dawn of the Agentic Age, where intelligent agents, not human analysts, will do the work. In this new age, startups and enterprises alike will rely on AI-powered agents to process vast volumes of compliance, security, and procurement questionnaires at unprecedented speed and accuracy.

The Resource Bottleneck for Startups

For an early-stage startup, nothing slows momentum like vendor qualifying questionnaires: security assessments, RFQs, compliance checks. A typical request from a large enterprise or systems integrator can involve dozens of documents and hundreds of questions. Traditionally, responding to such requests requires a team of compliance professionals and days–if not weeks–of manual effort. For resource-constrained startups, this creates an impossible dilemma: either divert scarce engineering talent to compliance or risk losing enterprise opportunities.

Enter the Age of Agents

This is where the Agentic model changes the game. Instead of human bandwidth, startups can now leverage agentic AI resources to handle these questionnaires: with speed, precision, and scalability. The work doesn’t disappear - it simply shifts from human analysts to autonomous, reasoning-powered agents.

A Real-World Case: Konfer’s Response to a Vendor Security Assessment

Recently, one of the largest technical services companies sent Konfer a 59-question Security and Data Privacy assessment document. Eating our own dog food, we decided to do an A/B testing, using 138 pages of 20 evidence files, reports, design, and policy documents.

Test A: Using Konfer Clear™ by an internal team member: the analysis was completed in just 1 hour and 10 minutes. The Konfer platform automatically created responses to each question and mapped evidence snippets to questions, generated responses along with reasoning, and compiled a detailed Excel report ready for submission.

Test B: hired an external consultant to develop the entire a detailed report manually for submission

Here are the internal observations:

To put this in perspective:
- Manual process: ~1 calendar week of dedicated analyst time.
- Konfer Clear (agentic): ~70 minutes, end-to-end.

The difference is not incremental. It’s exponential. And Konfer welcomes the startups to use this Konfer playbook for building the “dream” startup: 10/100/1000 – 10 employees, $100M ARR, and $1B valuation.

Why This Matters for AI Startups

This is more than efficiency - it’s survival. It is the future of compliance and verification processes. In the Age of Agents, a startup without a compliance team can still meet enterprise-grade demands. Every policy, procedure, and technical document becomes part of a company’s digital asset base, ready to be leveraged by agents to answer questions, close gaps, and generate audit-ready responses.

Beyond Compliance: A Model for the Future

What happened with the service company’s questionnaire is a preview of how the Agentic Age will unfold. Agents will assist humans to execute traditional manual tasks with incredible speed, accuracy, and scalability. Whether it’s responding to a security assessment, preparing for SOC 2 certification, or filling out RFQs, the model is clear:
- Humans define goals
- Agents do the work

Conclusion: The Chasm Crossed

The Anthropocene was about human ingenuity scaling an industry. The Agentic era will be about agents scaling knowledge. Startups no longer need to fear the compliance bottleneck. With solutions like Konfer Clear™, the impossible becomes routine, and the routine becomes instantaneous.

The age of agents has begun.

Published: September 23, 2025