Something to Consider March 2018 4
I was recently invited to present on a panel of expert practitioners on the topic of ‘Navigating Technology Innovations’ at the IIA’s General Audit Management Conference in Las Vegas, USA. This year’s conference was a milestone achievement with combined knowledge and experience of over 1700 Chief Audit Executives from around the world.
It was a great format to share experiences together with Erin Morrow and Marc Sabino of Citi, and Eugene Joung of Snap, under the guidance of our moderator Richard Chambers, President and CEO of the IIA.
The session covered RPA and Cloud technologies and my talk specifically was around the ‘Impact of AI on Audit and Assurance’. With Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning getting a lot of media attention, we delved into how these techniques offer step change improvements to data analytics and to audit and assurance as a discipline. One thought provoking comment was that “AI may not eliminate the job of the auditor, but auditors who embrace AI may take over the jobs of those that don’t!”
It was an insightful conference, with many knowledgeable speakers discussing where Audit needs to progress. There were a lot of great takeaways with some common themes, the highlights of which were beautifully summarised as a “call to action” for auditors by Manuel Coello, Senior Director of Data Analytics at Aetna.
The Top 10 Takeaways from the IIA GAM conference were:
1. Trigger transformation
2. Be innovative
3. Don’t be complacent
4. Embrace technology
5. Be deliberate
6. Take risks
7. Generate value
8. Create a flexible audit plan
9. Perform under pressure
10. Create high performing teams
You can see Manuel’s full post here
Our ‘Something To Consider’ snippets are framed as small, digestible, ‘dashes of insight’ around the pillars of what we define as “World Class Finance” – Process Optimization, Financial Control and Compliance, and Risk Assurance, all underpinned by technology enablement and integration.