Good morning. Finance chiefs are staring down a future where AI could rewrite the rules of auditing.
“CFOs are navigating a pace of change that is hard to fathom,” 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 also told me that GRC is no longer a back-office function or a “check-the-box” exercise.
Trust will determine how far AI goes, and GRC professionals are well-positioned to tackle that challenge, Soter said. “Over the next three to five years, AI will fundamentally redefine what it means to be an auditor,” he said. “We’re already seeing the rise of the ‘AI Auditor,’ as internal audit takes on the responsibility of governing AI models to ensure they are ethical, unbiased, and accurate.”
According to Workiva’s 2026 Executive Benchmark Survey, 76% of internal audit teams are already testing their organizations’ AI models. Business leaders surveyed almost unanimously agreed that the CFO, CIO, and CSO must unite for data governance to succeed.
At the Institute of Internal Auditors’ Great Audit Minds conference in Las Vegas on Monday, Workiva unveiled a revamped AI-powered GRC platform introducing AI capabilities to automate manual audit tasks, and designed to help finance and audit leaders see risk in real time. When a risk profile changes or a control is updated, that change flows automatically through connected reports and disclosures, linking finance, audit, risk, and sustainability, Soter said.
Early adopters of its AI features have saved up to 40% of their time, freeing teams to focus more on analysis, advising the business, and addressing emerging risks, according to Workiva, which has about 6,600 customers, such as Slack, Hershey, and KeyBank, according to its website.
Soter pointed to three early use cases where customers are already seeing impact. GRC teams are using Workiva AI to automatically map evidence to controls, stripping out what he calls the “human duct tape” that used to hold those processes together. Work that once took weeks can now be completed in minutes, he said.
AI is also handling much of the heavy lifting on summarizing information and drafting first versions of reports, using purpose-built functionality tailored to audit and risk workflows rather than generic large language models, he explained. One internal audit team told Workiva that it cut report-writing time by more than half.
Third, some of the company’s most advanced customers are using the platform to move toward continuous risk monitoring—a big ambition for the profession long discussed but difficult to achieve without automation, Soter said. The goal, he said, is to “detect the smoke before it escalates to fire.”
AI is increasingly the difference between “reacting to a crisis and preventing one—and the only real way to ensure audit-readiness at scale,” he said.
As the technology enables audit executives and their teams to spot risks earlier and deliver insights sooner, the role of internal audit will become synonymous with C-suite advisor, Soter said.
He also believes AI will reduce the historic friction between finance and external auditors. “CFOs will be able to grant secure, controlled access to real-time data,” he said. “Year-round testing means an end to the audit season fire drill.”
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
