“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”. Unless your company pays for you to go source new leads, referral partners, and inspiration for services offered. Then you are required to summarize your notes and contacts to demonstrate that the investment in traveling there for 3 nights from Cleveland, OH was worthwhile.
In March, I joined over 5,000 professionals in the FinTech industry to collaborate, share visions, and expand our networks. It was my first time at this conference and my first time in Vegas. To summarize my experience in one word, I would have to go with ‘Overwhelming’. Vegas is a lot, especially for a small town, Midwest man such as me.
The nice thing about this conference is that they offered a match making meeting app to bolster the connections you could make while in attendance. Between 2 days I had 20, speed-dating style meetings with CEOs, founders, CISOs, and account executives. After breezing through our elevator speeches, we would usually ask more probing questions, and I found myself describing how my team and my firm are using AI to differentiate from other regional CPA firms. After a few repetitions in my response, I came up with the following ways AI is making an impact on our audits;
- Automation and Efficiency One of the routine tasks for our staff involves reviewing evidence provided by the client to determine if the control activity was designed and implemented. This process can take on average, 1-15 minutes per control. When multiplied by 75-300 controls per engagement and 20-50 engagements an associate is staffed throughout the year, this amounts to approximately 1,900 hours per year per Associate in evidence review. Furthermore, there is additional time required to write a test procedure describing what setting or feature was inspected to confirm the control's existence. In Q4, 2024, we implemented a tool that uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automate this process, creating significant efficiencies for our staff. Upon document upload, files are converted to PDF and analyzed using OCR, with an AI-generated summary automatically created. As users query the documents, the AI utilizes the relevant content within the document to provide answers, along with source citations. The PDF document is annotated with the answers to these queries to streamline the review process and automate the test procedure write-up. To date, we have observed a 30-60% reduction in Associates' time spent on reviewing evidence per engagement, enabling them to perform more high-level analysis.
- Improved Audit Quality AI-driven processes deliver higher quality audits by transforming business processes at scale. For example, user access testing is a time-consuming task that involves matching usernames to individuals and analyzing whether the access level is appropriate, usually by inspecting the user's job title and responsibilities. AI assists us in analyzing larger data sets more quickly and accurately than before. By alleviating some of the more time-consuming tasks for auditors, AI allows them to apply their valuable skills in other areas, thereby enhancing the audit process for everyone.
After sharing some details with new connections, they were surprised to learn that our firm has approximately 150 employees. Due to the technology used and early adoption of AI in our audit process, they seemed to expect a larger company. I informed them that we offer quality comparable to large firms with fees typical of smaller firms.
