AI in audit: creating an AI-ready culture

AI won’t replace auditors, but auditors who implement and embrace AI will replace those who don’t.

For many audit functions, the biggest challenge in implementing AI is not the technology, but the people and processes. How do you get your auditors to drastically change their ways of working when they’ve spent their entire careers working in a certain way? How do you get top-level buy-in? How can you build reliability and trust in the outputs of your AI initiatives? Here are some of my thoughts for changing the way people think about AI in audit, to help create an audit environment that is ready to not only survive, but thrive in the AI evolution.

1. Begin with perspective

Taking a step back and seeing your business from an objective viewpoint is essential to understanding how you can do things differently. Often this is very hard to do yourself, given the continual demands of day-to-day audit operations. As such, external expertise can be crucial in helping to embed an AI-ready mindset.

We’ve seen a rise in demand for data culture analysis engagements, where the focus is to change behaviours within businesses and foster a data-driven culture. Creating this positive relationship with data enables a smoother, and more effective implementation of AI.

Many of our clients tell us that they’ve brought in AI coaches to help set standards. One company has hired an innovation champion to coach its people specifically on making the most of AI, including crafting effective prompts to ensure quality and reliability.

2. Gamification to generate innovation and engagement

A consistent problem across the market is that there is limited time, capacity and capability to embed AI into business process and culture. People in audit simply don’t have the time required to explore tooling and re-engineer processes to make the most of AI.

Hackathon-style, gamified events which focus on AI, are a great way of getting people involved in your AI journey and devoting enough time to building AI processes. These events don’t just help you assess your current level of expertise and generate ideas, but they also help to achieve cultural buy-in.

Adding a competitive element incentivises your people to engage and innovate. One of our clients recently hosted a hackathon where they gave participating teams six hours to create whatever AI tool they wanted. From the many ideas generated, the organisation selected a winner to develop over the next 12 months.

3. Educating leadership in the value of AI

An AI-ready mindset has to come from the top, and your leaders need to talk about it engagingly, convincingly and most importantly, positively. AI amplifies efficiency and accuracy, making auditors’ lives easier, and it should be celebrated at such. This leadership buy-in is the first step to getting the rest of the business to be engaged.

Getting this buy-in is primarily driven through showing the value that AI can bring. When undergoing exploration, experimentation and pilots, developing baseline productivity data is a great tool to show the real value in implementation of AI. Examples include cutting testing hours in half, increasing sample volumes, reducing human error rates or turning around reports within a day; powerful proof points for leadership.

4. Showing the rest of the business the way

Historically, audit areas may not have the reputation as the hub for innovation within a business, but in the case of AI, audit is perfectly placed to accelerate an organisation’s AI journey. In their role as an independent, objective line of assurance that connects risk information from different teams, the internal audit function is ideally placed with a complete, holistic view of risk across the organisation. This means audit teams’ successful use of AI can have a genuine impact on the business and everyone within it.

To take advantage of that position, the function needs to be seen as having an AI-first mindset. By pioneering a risk-based approach to AI, audit teams can lead the way, rather than being perceived as a blocker.

Conclusion: it all starts with culture

Embedding an AI-ready culture today positions audit teams to build sustained high performance tomorrow. You can achieve that through bringing in the right perspective, gamified events, educating your leadership and taking a proactive, risk-based approach to AI governance and adoption, helping your organisation build a culture that values data and embraces AI.

These insights were derived from our event on AI in Audit: Shaping the Future of Audit in Financial Services. You can find out more about the event here. If you need support getting your team ready to embed AI into your audit function, please get in touch with me.