A major shift is occurring in auditing

Good morning. Finance leaders are confronting a future where artificial intelligence could overhaul the auditing playbook.

“CFOs are navigating a speed of transformation that’s challenging to fully comprehend,” said Steve Soter, VP and industry principal at Workiva, an AI-powered platform for governance, risk, and compliance (Workiva is also a sponsor of CFO Daily). He added that governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) is no longer confined to back-office operations or a mere “check-the-box” activity.

Trust will shape AI’s reach, and GRC professionals are well-equipped to address this challenge, Soter noted. “Over the next three to five years, AI will fundamentally redefine what it means to be an auditor,” he said. “We’re already witnessing the emergence of the ‘AI Auditor,’ as internal audit takes on the role of governing AI models to ensure they’re ethical, impartial, and accurate.”

Workiva’s 2026 Executive Benchmark Survey reveals that 76% of internal audit teams are already testing their organizations’ AI models. Surveyed business leaders nearly universally agreed that the CFO, CIO, and CSO must collaborate for successful data governance.

At the Institute of Internal Auditors’ Great Audit Minds conference in Las Vegas on Monday, Workiva launched an updated AI-powered GRC platform. The new tool introduces AI capabilities to automate manual audit tasks and is designed to help finance and audit leaders monitor risk in real time. When a risk profile shifts or a control is updated, the change automatically propagates through connected reports and disclosures, linking finance, audit, risk, and sustainability efforts, Soter said.

Early users of its AI features have saved up to 40% of their time, allowing teams to focus more on analysis, advising the business, and addressing emerging risks, according to Workiva, which counts around 6,600 customers—including Slack, Hershey, and KeyBank—per its website.

Soter highlighted three early use cases where customers are seeing tangible results. GRC teams are using Workiva AI to automatically map evidence to controls, eliminating what he terms the “human duct tape” that previously held these processes together. Work that once took weeks can now be completed in minutes, he noted.

AI is also handling much of the labor-intensive work of summarizing information and drafting initial report versions, using specialized functionality tailored to audit and risk workflows rather than generic large language models, he explained. One internal audit team informed Workiva that it reduced report-writing time by more than half.

Third, some of the company’s most advanced customers are leveraging the platform to move toward continuous risk monitoring—a long-discussed but hard-to-achieve goal for the profession without automation, Soter said. The aim, he added, is to “detect the smoke before it turns into a fire.”

AI is increasingly the factor that differentiates between “reacting to a crisis and preventing one—and the only genuine way to ensure audit-readiness on a large scale,” he said.

As the technology enables audit executives and their teams to identify risks earlier and deliver insights faster, the role of internal audit will become synonymous with that of a C-suite advisor, Soter stated.

He also believes AI will ease the longstanding friction between finance and external auditors. “CFOs will be able to provide secure, controlled access to real-time data,” he said. “Year-round testing will put an end to the audit season scramble.”

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@.com