While auditing can hardly be coupled with the word ‘entertaining’, companies and regulators take audits very seriously.
Auditors nowadays face the challenge of reviewing thousands of documents, scrutinising hundreds of contracts, reviewing the implementation of regulatory changes and undertaking investigations on ambiguous transactions. While auditors spend considerable time flipping pages and opening individual digital files to review them, it is arguable that artificial intelligence could help on some of those tasks.
AI is definitely not the right vehicle for very complex analysis, but for those repetitive, semi-defined tasks, a well-tuned system will start counting items, spot patterns, and flag anomalies to a level that meets and exceeds the requirements of a corporate exercise.