The Painkiller Test
Every investor, every procurement officer, and every CISO asks the same question when evaluating a security tool: is this a vitamin or a painkiller?
Vitamins are nice to have. You take them out of habit. You might not notice when you stop. Painkillers are different. You reach for them because something hurts right now, and you cannot function without relief.
The distinction matters because it predicts adoption, budget survival, and renewal rates. A vitamin gets cut in the next budget review. A painkiller gets defended. The test is simple: if you removed this tool tomorrow, what breaks?
Most security tools fail this test. They produce reports nobody reads, dashboards nobody opens after the first week, and compliance checkboxes that satisfy auditors but do nothing to reduce actual risk. They are vitamins dressed up as painkillers.
To understand why this matters more in 2026 than ever before, you need to understand what changed.
The Cambrian Explosion of B2B Apps
The cost to build a new software application has collapsed to near zero. This is not a gradual decline. It is a cliff.
A new generation of AI-powered development tools, sometimes called "vibe coding" platforms, has made it possible for anyone to build and ship a functional SaaS application in hours. Lovable alone generates over 100,000 new projects per day, with more than 10 million total projects created since launch. Bolt.new reached 5 million users within five months, with roughly 1 million daily active users. Cursor hit $1 billion in annual recurring revenue faster than any B2B company in history.
These are not toy projects. 25% of Y Combinator's Winter 2025 cohort had codebases that were 95% or more AI-generated (per YC president Garry Tan). According to JetBrains' 2025 Developer Ecosystem survey, 41% of all code written globally is now AI-generated. And 63% of people using these vibe coding tools have zero traditional programming background.
The result is a Cambrian Explosion of new B2B applications. Not concentrated in one or two verticals, but spreading across every team and department in the enterprise: sales, marketing, HR, legal, product management, engineering, security, compliance, finance, customer success. Each department now has its own fast-moving SaaS ecosystem, with new tools appearing weekly.
Data from the Financial Times shows year-on-year growth in new websites surging 30-40% through 2025-2026, with iOS app submissions and GitHub code output spiking in parallel (source).
AI Agents Are Multiplying the Attack Surface
It is not just human-built apps. AI agents are proliferating as independent software actors that connect to enterprise data, make API calls, and process sensitive information autonomously.
Salesforce reported 29,000 Agentforce deals in Q4 FY26 (up 50% quarter-over-quarter), generating $800 million in ARR. Those agents delivered 2.4 billion agentic work units and consumed roughly 20 trillion tokens (source). Agentforce accounts in production rose approximately 50% quarter-over-quarter. And that is just one platform.
McKinsey's State of AI 2025 report found that 78% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, up from 55% just one year prior. Each of those AI deployments is, functionally, a new vendor relationship that requires risk assessment.
Your security team was already drowning at 100 vendor reviews per quarter. Now imagine 100 new tools appearing per week, across every department, many of them built and deployed by people who have never written a security questionnaire.
Pain #1: The Visibility Gap
You cannot protect what you cannot see. And right now, most organizations cannot see the majority of their SaaS exposure.
The Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 72% of employees created generative AI accounts with personal email addresses, completely bypassing corporate SSO, procurement, and security review. MIT's NANDA Report confirmed that over 90% of companies have employees using personal AI tools for work, even when only 40% have purchased official subscriptions.
The perception gap is staggering. McKinsey's Superagency 2025 study revealed that C-suite executives estimate only 4% of employees use generative AI tools heavily. Employees self-report usage rates three times higher. Leadership is not just unaware of the problem; they are actively underestimating it by a factor of three.
Meanwhile, 63% of organizations lack AI governance policies entirely (IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2025). There is no framework for evaluating which AI tools are acceptable, no process for onboarding them, and no visibility into which ones are already in use.
Shadow AI has now displaced "security skills shortages" as a top-three most costly breach factor, according to IBM. It is no longer an emerging concern. It is an active, measurable source of financial damage.
Pain #2: The Assessment Bottleneck
Even when organizations do identify new vendors, the assessment process cannot keep up.
Traditional third-party risk management (TPRM) requires security questionnaires, document reviews, back-and-forth with vendors, and manual scoring. A single assessment takes 2-8 weeks. The backlog grows faster than the team can clear it, and every week of delay is a week of unassessed risk exposure.
The consequences are already visible. IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report found that 20% of organizations experienced a breach directly tied to unsanctioned AI use. Those breaches added $670,000 on average to incident costs, above and beyond the baseline breach cost.
With worldwide SaaS spending projected at $295 billion in 2026 (Gartner) and 71% of organizations planning to invest in new AI software, the assessment backlog is not shrinking. It is accelerating.
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Try a Free Assessment →Why Most Security Tools Fail the Test
Most vendor risk management tools fail the painkiller test for one of three reasons:
They add friction without removing pain. They require manual data entry, long configuration periods, and dedicated analysts to operate. The team was already understaffed. Adding a tool that requires more headcount to run does not solve the problem; it redistributes it.
They generate dashboards nobody reads. A dashboard that shows "you have 347 vendors with medium risk" is not actionable. It is wallpaper. If the output of a tool requires a human to interpret, prioritize, and act on every finding, the tool is a vitamin. It makes the team feel informed without actually reducing exposure.
They solve compliance checkbox problems, not operational ones. Many TPRM tools exist to satisfy auditor requirements: "Do you have a vendor risk management program? Yes. Here is the tool." The tool produces evidence for auditors, but the underlying risk remains unmanaged. The gap between compliance and security widens every quarter.
Apply the test. If you turned off your current VRM tool tomorrow, what would break? If the answer is "our auditor would notice at the next review cycle," you have a vitamin. If the answer is "we would have zero visibility into what our employees are using and whether it is safe," you have a painkiller.
What Actually Passes
A tool passes the painkiller test when it delivers four things simultaneously:
- 100% vendor visibility without manual cataloging. Discovery happens automatically, through browser-level detection, SSO integration, expense system analysis, and identity provider logs. No spreadsheets. No quarterly surveys. No reliance on employees self-reporting.
- Instant risk assessment. Seconds, not weeks. When a new vendor appears, the risk profile is available immediately, not after a procurement cycle. The assessment covers security, privacy, commercial risk, and compliance dimensions simultaneously.
- Risk intelligence at the point of decision. The moment an employee visits a new AI tool or SaaS application, they see the risk profile before they share any data. Not in a separate dashboard they will never check. In the browser, in real time, at the moment it matters.
- Compliance-ready evidence as a byproduct. Audit documentation, vendor inventories, risk reports, and approval records are generated automatically as part of the workflow. Compliance is not a separate workstream. It is a side effect of operational security.
This is the approach behind RRR's Risk Co-Pilot: a browser extension that detects vendor usage in real time, triggers instant AI-powered risk assessment, and gives employees and security teams shared visibility into every tool across the organization. It is not a dashboard you check weekly. It is a co-pilot that works alongside every employee, every day.
The Litmus Test for Your Stack
If you are a CISO evaluating your current security tooling, ask three questions:
- "If I removed this tool tomorrow, what breaks?" If the answer is vague or limited to "we lose a dashboard," the tool is a vitamin.
- "Does this tool reduce my assessment backlog or add to it?" Tools that require manual input, dedicated analysts, or multi-week onboarding are adding to the bottleneck, not solving it.
- "Can a non-security employee use this without training?" The Cambrian Explosion means risk decisions are being made by marketers, salespeople, and product managers every day. If your tool only works for security professionals, it covers a fraction of the surface area.
The organizations that will weather the Cambrian Explosion are not the ones with the most comprehensive TPRM questionnaires. They are the ones whose security tooling operates at the speed of adoption: automatically, invisibly, and at every point where employees interact with new software.
The painkiller test is not abstract. It is the difference between a security program that scales with the business and one that falls further behind every quarter.
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