10 Takeaways from Inaugural AI in Audit Peer Discussion Group

This past Thursday, May 30th, we hosted our inaugural AI in Audit Peer Discussion Group. The virtual event exceeded our expectations with 28 highly engaged and enthusiastic audit professionals from a variety of mid to large US-based Accounting firms.

Moving forward we plan to host AI in Audit Peer Group discussions and webinars at least 1x per month to encourage learning and idea sharing among auditors passionate about leveraging AI. If you’d like to receive updates about future events join our mailing list here.?

Below is a combined summary of the key takeaways from the discussion groups organized by theme.?

Opportunities

• Participants generally agreed that AI has a huge opportunity to move towards a ‘real time’ or ‘continuous’ audit in the longer term. A future state for the industry could be one where the client’s financial (and other supporting data ) is being continuously monitored and assessed by the Audit firm as part of the interim or final audit.?
• Some smaller sized accounting firms were excited to leverage Gen AI to adopt more traditional machine learning techniques to reshape data analytics within audit. Previously, the effort required to cleanse and label the data required to feed into the model was too prohibitive.?

Concerns

• Some participants worry that people will become too reliant on AI and then never learn the basics.?
• Some participants worry that AI will replace the role of auditors and make them obsolete.?

Risk Management & Security

• To manage risk most participants agreed that it is best to start with simple use-cases. Examples include: Using AI to create outputs that can be easily validated, for example by looking at the source documentation; and using AI to check the work of humans - for e.g. by generating exception reports.
• Many participants worried about the validity of the information coming from the model.
• There is a big need to roll out quality control processes to control AI model usage, inputs and outputs, and in what context the model is being used in the firm's workflow.

Regulation

• Participants agreed that Regulators have been slow to act on technological changes in the past. It would not be wise to wait for the regulators to publish a standard on AI. Firms needed to be nimble in their approach and use the latest technology in a manner that conforms to the existing auditing standards.?

Cost?

• Participants generally agreed that they do not see the business model and particularly the fees that are charged to change dramatically as a result of AI. They saw AI as part of the broader technology transformation that has been taking place over the last several years and the technology fees to be baked in as a part of the overall fees that auditors charge their clients.

Training/ Rollout

• Some participants want to use AI co-pilots to train junior staff and build AI models

Tellen builds enterprise AI infrastructure enabling accounting firms to launch secure and compliant Gen AI solutions for employees and clients. If you’d like to learn more about what we do or how we can help you deploy a custom AI solution for your accounting firm contact [email protected] .