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The Institute of Internal Auditors presents all things internal audit tech sponsored by data sniper Mike Levy sits down with Vidya Peters, CEO of Data Snipper, to discuss how AI is reshaping audit work and how internal auditors can lead the charge. They discuss real world leadership lessons, pitfalls and AI adoption.
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And practical steps for auditors looking to evolve with emerging technologies. This is a companion episode to the internal audit that catalysts for strong AI governance. You can find this global best practice, LinkedIn, the show notes.
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Talk to me about what your experience has been at data sniper and how you've focused on growing the organization as it relates to AI.
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I'm coming up now on 2 years since I started a data sniper and it has been a very fast-paced, fast changing journey. When I started Jenny I wasn't even being spoken of in the market and so we were mostly trying to solve this.
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Very painful problem for auditors. Auditors have been mired in manual work and we were looking to make their jobs just a little bit easy.
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There and then when Jenny I came onto the market, it completely changed the potential and the scale of the problems we could solve and how well we could solve them for auditors. So nothing has been the same in the last two years. And I think that's been the most exciting.
00:01:27 Speaker 3
Part of the job.
00:01:28 Speaker 2
That's that's amazing. As internal auditors, we very often talk about generative AI cause a lot. I think what we're seeing in the industry is a lot of practitioners are trying to figure out how to adopt it within their internal audit function, but then also how to.
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Audited from a governance perspective, within organizations in the last two years since the advent of things like ChatGPT, and integration of generative AI into the product, what were some of the early pitfalls that you that that the team discovered and where are you seeing internal auditors deriving the most value in today's world?
00:01:56 Speaker 3
I think of this as a two-part problem. One is the technology landscape is changing so rapidly and so even the possibilities of how you can use Gen. AI is exponentially different now than it was even a few months ago. On the other hand.
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Internal auditors and auditors in general.
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You are very, very resistant to change. They're very conservative about the technologies they adopt. They're very thoughtful and mindful of how that technology is used. And so the conundrum for everyone that is looking to solve problems for auditors is how do you move quickly and nimbly to take the best?
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Of technology.
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But actually do it at a rate and a pace that's actually absorbable and acceptable for auditors.
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It's very funny you say that because as practitioners, I find that when I in my role, I very often interact with different internal audit departments and so much of our job in this day and age is working through change management and transformation within companies and we're very commonly making recommendations around things like that. But I agree with you when you look at the practices internal to a department.
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You're still seeing while there's technology in a lot of places, you're still seeing a lot of Excel driven manipulations. You're seeing a lot of manual processes, and anytime you're asking to challenge that, you do see some resistance there. When you, when you think about your organization and how you're helping internal auditors, what what are some of the ways that you're balancing the to your point?
00:03:26 Speaker 2
Moving things forward on the learning curve, especially with something like gender AI, because I think we can all admit when most people didn't even know what it was two years ago and now you can't find someone that's not using it in some way, shape or form. How have you worked through so that process to help internal auditors move that forward because they are sometimes resistant to?
00:03:45 Speaker 3
There are two principles that we've held very near and dear data sniper that is actually at the heart of how we start as a company and those two principles are what are the best technologies that we can build with to solve the most painful problems in on it. And then the second is how deeply do we understand our customers so we can build the product in a way that's right.
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For them, and to answer your question, going to take you a little bit back in time because data sniper started in 2017 and the original product was a stand alone application and.
00:04:18 Speaker 3
It just would not get adopted by any auditors, and the Founders kept asking a question. Why is that? Because we're solving this problem so much better than you doing this manually, and they kept coming back to. This is not where we do our work. I am not going to leave my workflow in Excel to come and learn a new product and do this in a new application.
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And to the Founders credit, they pivoted and they rebuilt the product in Excel and that's when data sniper took off.
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And I think there's an important nugget in there, which is how do you bring the best of technology to solve problems elegantly, but do it in a way that is right for the customer and what has been right for our customers, for auditors is to not disrupt their workflow, which tends to be in Excel. And so the question we keep asking ourselves is.
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Not how do we get them to do their work differently, but to make their work. So drop dead easy in their current workflow that it's hard to imagine it to do it any other way.
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I said I've been. I've been really lucky in my career that I've gotten to experience a lot of different technology platforms, both in the finance operations, space, cyber security and internal audit and.
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One of the to your point, the easiest ways to have change adopted is to find a fit into their workflow, and you're seeing that even in large scale ERP implementations where you may have the most robust, sophisticated ERP, but they still are having excel based plugins and things like that because they're there's a realization that people are always going to go back to what they're comfortable with no matter what.
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And that to me, even when I think about generative AI, that's one of the value propositions of it, because you can just ask it things. And even if you're just using a ChatGPT like product, you've just ask it things like in spoken word, word in the way that you're used to interacting with a human.
00:05:57 Speaker 2
And it's giving you that the responsiveness there if you don't mind talk to us a little bit more about how the generative AI, how gender of AI is being adopted in the platform, specifically what you know, what are the, what were the first use cases and then what I guess where where do you see the road map going on that?
00:06:11 Speaker 3
So when Jenny I came on, like many companies, we said, OK, we gotta go build a product that allows our audit customers to be able to converse with our documents.
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And so we built an application, you know to to simply that we realize again, we are solving this problem, forgetting about what's important to our customers. Our customers don't want to disrupt their workflow. They don't want to go into chat, CBT and start chatting with it because that is a completely different workflow.
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From where they're spending hours and you know their.
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Days doing their audit procedures, writing their work papers. So we said. How can we approach this problem differently and where we landed after a lot of in-depth customer interviews and really understanding how our customers like to use technology is we brought the beauty of Gen. AI into Excel. So we built a product called document which allows you to use your natural language and write all your questions.
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Down in excel.
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And have those questions answered of every document in your work paper in Excel. But the big difference is and we realize this is critical for auditors is number one, they don't want hallucination, they want answers that they can stand behind and they want hard evidence. They don't want chat. CPT's interpretation of the documents leave the interpretation.
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Of auditors who can make the right judgment call on the interpretation of.
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Laws and and how to best assess risk, but give them the hard answers. So number one, we brought Jen AI into Excel #2 we provide the hard evidence and the snips that allow auditors to stand behind the answers and the insights and understand exactly why the AI made the recommendation of dead and #3 we allow the.
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Auditors to do what they do best, which is allow them to make the final judgment call on what they recommend to their customers.
00:07:56 Speaker 2
When you looked at the different leadership mistakes that sometimes happen with a a growing organization, because this is something we as practitioners are dealing with within organizations, everybody's trying to figure out how to properly adopt and even if we're not.
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Within our company, in within our departments, our companies are adopting in some way, shape or form. What are some but as as you have grown over the last couple of years and continue to adopt new features and functionalities with gender AI, what are some of like the common missteps or things that auditors that your audience should look to within their organizations to help so they can avoid it with their?
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Companies.
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You know.
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You've never seen this happen in the industry before, but I was at a session yesterday and the the speaker on stage said raise your hand if you're using AI in your work today and 90% of the room raised their hands now.
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The part that surprised me is that when we actually talked to companies, they actually have not approved the use of AI at these companies.
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Governance is all over the place, to your point. There's not a lot of process.
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So for the first time I'm seeing a huge divide between what the companies are authorizing their employees to do and the reality on the ground of what they're actually doing. And so this is, I think, a critical moment for the IT teams, the security teams to.
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Wake up.
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And to make their decisions faster, to move with where the people are going, because I think they're losing complete control over where their documents are, where their data is, because they're being too slow to respond.
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We spend a lot of time talking about the risk and data disruption and disclosure with it. With this if not used correctly, I've seen some companies when I when we've worked with them.
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They're doing things like saying you cannot use chat, CBT or you can't use gender of AI, and I think that's also a mistake because the moment you block something like that, it's just it's cybersecurity. One on people are going to find a way around it and then to your point, I'm seeing very mismatched alignment of governance within organizations. Some have nothing. Some have stood up committees, but ultimately.
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What I've what I've realized is, no matter whether you are adopting or not adopting, it's getting adopted in some way, shape or form, whether it's our individual employees.
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Using it or what we're seeing is third party providers. The vast majority of them are adopting AI in some way, shape or form. And when we think about third party risks as auditors, it's happening. Whether we do anything or not. So at, to your point, I mean the governance and understanding some.
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Of.
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The mistakes that were made and how we can remedy them, I think the education there becomes really important.
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How about like if we think about like some of the compliance and compliance risks and legal and regulatory, is that something that?
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Your organization's been thinking through in terms of if if a state comes in and regulates it, or we have a governmental regulation talk, talk to me a little bit about that process.
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By the way, I just wanted to say one last thing on on the previous area, which is people are voting with their feet on the use of AI and finance is actually falling behind and what they're going to find pretty soon is they have lost complete control over their data. And if they are not making the decisions that are actually going to help their employees, they're going to make.
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It for them.
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So.
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I think it it's the first time that auditors are dragging governance teams to where they need them to be.
00:11:03 Speaker 2
And and to that point real quick that, I mean, it's also a huge opportunity for internal auditors because we spend a lot of time talking about assurance versus advisory services. And one of the things in this space we can truly be advisors to our organizations here and.
00:11:15 Speaker 2
This is such a maturing area.
00:11:17 Speaker 2
And everybody's learning at the same time. If we go in and try to do an assurance based project here, there's not as much that we can do. However, if we go in as advisors and assurance providers that are really sitting there saying how do we look at the road map, what is the governance process look like help, think through the risks early on. It's really a place we can deliver a lot of value for organizations.
00:11:37 Speaker 2
As well, so I couldn't agree with you more.
00:11:38 Speaker 3
100% yeah to your second question on regular.
00:11:43 Speaker 3
I actually think of that as a design constraint rather than a blocker. It's a great forcing function. Companies for companies to think very thoughtfully about how they're building their products. So for example, it we spend a lot of time thinking about document retention and training on documents because we know that's sacred to our customers. So how can we ensure the highest security standards?
00:12:02 Speaker 3
And the highest transparency to our customers. So they know exactly what's happening with their.
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Data.
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But second, we know that not all AI products are created equally. And when we think about our customers.
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They care very deeply about the integrity of answers, and so we want to ensure that we build products where it's very, very clear and transparent how the AI is generating the answer as it does so that auditors not only know that they can trust the insights that they're getting, but then they can stand behind them when they're speaking about it to their end clients.
00:12:34 Speaker 2
Yeah, it's and it's to your point. The concept of hallucinations within a I mean that's that's been a huge topic of conversation within the community because one thing we are seeing is.
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Earlier career internal auditors don't have as much of the historic knowledge and skill set, so when they are prompting or when they are asking questions or utilizing a tool, they're not always aware when they're getting a whole nation back. Is one thing that.
00:12:56 Speaker 2
Generative AI is really good at is making something sound really good, even if it's just completely fabricated or inaccurate. So there is a level of skepticism that has to be applied and to the extent that that can be offset and we can mitigate some of that through the right technology solutions. I think that's hugely important in reliance and moving things to the next. The next step here.
00:13:16 Speaker 2
How about agentic a I mean, so we're we're hearing of the the buzzword there quite a bit and you know for me when I think about it, I think about we a couple of years ago we were talking about robotic process automation, not non-stop and then we got into generative AI. To me it almost feels like a amalgamation of the two together. But is that something that your organization's been thinking about or how do you see adoption looking of that over the next 12 to 24 months?
00:13:41 Speaker 3
I think there is incredible potential ahead with Agentic AI.
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I'm going to come back to the initial conundrum that I mentioned that's happening in this space, which is AI itself is evolving so quickly and the potential of what is possible here is changing exponentially in months. Meanwhile, we have a customer base that is actually quite conservative and quite concerned about the use of technology and how best to use it. And so how do you ensure you're building products?
00:14:05 Speaker 3
At at the speed at the rate at which you can bring the most innovative products to market.
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But do it in a way where change management, education, awareness changes to workflows are done very thoughtfully. And I say that because.
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This is a very fine art to balance in the field of audit. It's not that if I build out an agentic product tomorrow, I'm going to have auditors line up. We're still getting them to adopt AI, even at the most preliminary level. In some of these organizations. So the critical part for me is to take on change management education.
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Awareness training, understanding of how it can.
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Augment your work, not replace your work. That is, as much of the work that we have as technology providers as to build these products themselves.
00:14:55 Speaker 1
Hey guys. I just wanted to stop and give you a little bit about our sponsor for this episode. Data sipper makes audits faster, smarter and easier, all without leaving Excel used by the BIG4.
00:15:07 Speaker 1
And over half a million professionals globally. It's intelligent automation built for finance. If you're looking to streamline your next audit, head to dataskipper.com or you can check out the link.
00:15:17 Speaker 1
In the show notes.
00:15:20 Speaker 2
I'm really excited about some of the.
00:15:23 Speaker 2
Perspectives here around continuous monitoring and how we, you know, one of the other things we're hearing within the profession is there's we're we're in the middle of a resource shortage and we can't find enough people to do the work that we need. We have more and more emerging risks. And to me, when I hear you talk about some of these things, one of the one of the pieces of it, I get really excited about is it allows auditors to do more with less. So ultimately.
00:15:43 Speaker 2
There's a world here where we can have more risk coverage, but do it in a way that we can rely on the data but have more, have more reliance on some of the tools and technologies.
00:15:51 Speaker 2
As.
00:15:51 Speaker 2
Well, I think that's critically important as we move forward. I mean you saw that if you go back years ago, you saw that with the advent of cloud technology and then we moved into some RP, a type things and automations and workflow technologies. And now we're here with General AI.
00:16:05 Speaker 2
What do you think is what do you think is next from that lens? Where do you think some of the big areas of focus that we'll see auditors think about?
00:16:12 Speaker 3
I think there are three ways of change that are going to come up in audit, but before I get into those three waves, I want to talk a little bit about what's going on in the industry because this context is important.
00:16:22 Speaker 3
At #1, a lot of people don't realize that this industry is under siege. As you mentioned briefly, there are fewer and fewer people studying accounting as a profession, so there are fewer graduates each year from the accounting profession. But even a fewer portion of them are joining accounting as a profession, despite having the degree. So there you have.
00:16:43 Speaker 3
A problem that's just compounded, but there's a third problem there, which is 60% of the people with at least over five years of experience are leaving the industry entirely due to burnout. So you have fewer people entering the profession, more people leaving.
00:16:58 Speaker 3
The second issue is the regulatory requirements on audit or only increasing with CSRD requirements. With blockchain. With you know, just keep adding layer on layer on the requirements. The level of regulatory scrutiny, the level of requirements are only increasing. Businesses are not getting any less complex, they're only going more complex. It's a one way.
00:17:18 Speaker 3
Great. So fewer people who do the job, more work to do. And then the third is the quality is suffering. So 4 out of 10 PC AOB audits are considered flawed. That's 40%. That is an insane amount. If you think about how.
00:17:31 Speaker 3
Critical the world of audit is it's important for just societies and economies to function for you and I to be able to trust the data we see and go, OK, I trusted these numbers are real and I can make decisions on purchase of products or services based on these numbers. It's a very, very underrated industry. It happens behind the scenes and it's under siege.
00:17:51 Speaker 3
So I think.
00:17:52 Speaker 3
That, you know, you talk about the threat of AI generally if you open up any newspaper and it talks about, hey, could I eliminate industries? Could they eliminate, you know, jobs at scale?
00:18:03 Speaker 3
I would say potentially for a lot of industries we are very far from in audit.
00:18:07 Speaker 2
Yeah, I it does. I've I've had a lot of people ask me that question about is it gonna? Is AI gonna take our jobs because there was a there was a study about a year ago and you know chat CPT even was asked where do you think 10 industries that will be disrupted in accountants and auditors were were one of them.
00:18:21 Speaker 2
I'm not particularly concerned about that because if you ask any chief audit executive and you know anecdotally I've done, I I do this quite often when I interact with them.
00:18:28 Speaker 2
No one is telling us that they feel like they have the proper amount of resources to cover their risks and I I get excited about this cause I think this could actually be the first time that we might get closer to that lens, even in a place where we have a staffing shortage. So to the extent we can create automation in some of this process, more continuous monitoring, more risk.
00:18:45 Speaker 2
Average it gives us a lens that we didn't have and it's another tool in our toolbox to execute in a in a more meaningful way with management.
00:18:52 Speaker 3
100% and here's why I think that audit is very far from getting replaced completely by AI and and here's why the three reasons. I think #1 people underestimate the CEO of Grey, that accountants and auditors.
00:19:07 Speaker 3
Float in there are some answers that are black and white and yes and no. And actually the lion's share of them are not. It's about the interpretation of rules. It's about the application of the interpretation on new and emerging industries, new and emerging problem sets. And that's where the expertise comes in. Second, I don't believe that the SEC would ever be deposing.
00:19:27 Speaker 3
That's BT to stand behind an audit, right? Ultimately what you're paying for is the expertise of someone to stand behind now that that goes, yes, I trust.
00:19:34 Speaker 3
This person, because of the experience, the knowledge that they're applying and their reputation and brand behind standing behind and on it. The third reason I believe that they won't be replaced is because a huge part that people underestimate is building client relationships. Data is not just provided to you on a silver platter and a big part of what auditors do is actually build the right relationship to know the right questions, to ask, to get the right data.
00:19:59 Speaker 3
And that is a huge part of the work done by audit teams that people underestimate. They seem to think that we're just running procedures in a spreadsheet and there's so much happens behind the scenes. And I also want to come back to the original question you asked, which is what are those levels of change in AI? And I believe they'll happen in three waves.
00:20:20 Speaker 3
1 is.
00:20:22 Speaker 3
Number one, and this is the most painful part of the work that is happening now, which is the automation of manual work. If you have less talent and you have more regulatory requirements and more of your audit quality is suffering, the most immediate pain is OK how do you automate the most painful parts of the work? And that's where a lot of work has already been done on data.
00:20:41 Speaker 3
Extraction on matching on cross referencing. That's the lowest hanging fruit.
00:20:46 Speaker 3
The second one has to do with analysis at scale, and auditors are just scratching the surface on using AI on that. And then the third one will be the agenda, which is how do you automate entire workflows and have entire workflows be done for you and then you can be the reviewers of that work. We're still a little bit away from that because we're still in the first wave of that.
00:21:07 Speaker 3
Information.
00:21:07 Speaker 2
To your point, I think there's still a lot more to come and a lot more opportunity around all of this. So when you think about to your earlier comments about change management and auditors in general being slower to adopt one of the questions I get asked quite right.
00:21:19 Speaker 2
Really is. What do I do to prepare? How do I learn more about this? So if I'm an internal auditor and I'm trying to prepare more for AI, increasing both in my role as an internal auditor, but also just within my organization as a whole, what would you recommend as a first step or a second step for me to take and to continue to enhance my skill set?
00:21:38 Speaker 3
Auditors need to become technologists. It's not just about the accounting rules and regulations, but they actually have to start understanding the use of AI. Like you mentioned, get better at prompt engineering, understand how the underlying tech works, where your data is being used, how answers are being derived.
00:21:54 Speaker 3
A big part of your time should be spent on understanding technology, because if you don't, you will be replaced by someone who does so.
00:22:03 Speaker 3
Sort of digging your head in the sand and saying, hey, technology should be for the innovation group and I don't need to worry about it. That ship has sailed. So #1 adopted or you will get left behind. The second is I believe now auditors.
00:22:15 Speaker 3
Have more of a responsibility to play a more active role with their internal security team, their IT teams to push for the adoption of tools. So like we talked a little bit earlier, the gatekeepers are being left behind because they've set the gates so strict and so tight that their own users are breaking.
00:22:35 Speaker 3
Breaking through and using AI, whether they have permission to do that or not, which means now the responsibility lies with auditors to push their internal teams to move with the times faster at a more rapid change, so that they can bring on the use of technology and tools. And the third, I would say, is to be nimble because we're going to make a lot.
00:22:53 Speaker 3
Mistakes as as we all figure out how best to use AI here. So you have to take big risks, but you got to be ready to pivot.
00:23:00 Speaker 2
Yeah, the the nimble and agility, I mean that resonates really significantly with me because I think.
00:23:06 Speaker 2
This whole it gets back to the concept of audit planning and how we think about where the risks are that we need to audit and auditors that are, you know, sometimes they used to see a three to five year audit plan that never changed and that the world of that is is done and I mean at the end of the day if there is a three-year audit plan I used to say to my audit committee when I was a chief audit executive if my audit plan doesn't change on an annual basis.
00:23:26 Speaker 2
I'm doing something wrong at the end of day and especially in the advent of AI and some of the emerging risks we're seeing, there's no way to execute in a.
00:23:33 Speaker 2
In a way that's going to.
00:23:35 Speaker 2
Be where you know what your plan is going to be 3 years from now. It's just not possible anymore. Final words or advice for auditors and as they think about tools and technology and adoption and integration, what anything else that you think auditors should be thinking about here to continue to move this for because at the end of the day when we think about our our practice within companies, it's really how do we protect organizations from risks and highlight.
00:23:58 Speaker 2
And spotlight it.
00:23:58 Speaker 2
But the way ways that we can do that more effectively and efficiently is should always be top of mind for us. So any advice you have for internal auditors thinking about that within their organizations?
00:24:08 Speaker 3
I couldn't think of a more exciting time to be in audit, and here's why. Number one, I don't think people appreciate enough how critical this industry is for societies. For economies to function, and I think it's time we all raise our heads and take pride in the criticality of the work being done by audit.
00:24:28 Speaker 3
#2, I think there's so much potential for technology to make these jobs so cool again, because when you are talking about why people graduate with a degree in accounting 20 years ago, it used to be because your risk averse, you wanted a job for life. You wanted a steady salary, and you wanted a job that you wouldn't be.
00:24:48 Speaker 3
Innovate it out of.
00:24:50 Speaker 3
That is not the case anymore today. This job is going to be as much about technology as it is about accounting, and I think that you have a tremendous opportunity to attract the brightest minds, the most innovative minds because this industry is going to turn 180° and how innovative it is, how cool it is. So I couldn't think of a more fun time to be in this industry. I think it's going to be cool to be an accountant again.
00:25:10 Speaker 2
These are the things I get so excited about when I think about when I think about our.
00:25:14 Speaker 2
We we we have this very unique role where yeah, sometimes the connotation of audit is not the most fun thing when you when you hear others talk about it, but we see every lens of an organization and these are cutting edge changes to your point. And we get to be at the.
00:25:27 Speaker 2
More front of of them with an organization, so I couldn't agree with you more. Thank you so much for your time today. It was a pleasure having you and looking forward.
00:25:33 Speaker 2
To having you back again in the future.
00:25:35 Speaker 3
Thanks so much. This was a blast.
00:25:38 Speaker 1
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00:25:59 Speaker 1
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