Headlines about how AI is changing different professions are everywhere, and auditing is no exception. But what does the hype boil down to for auditors in the real world, and are regulators on top of these new developments?

Three finance leaders with AI expertise—Will Bible, audit and assurance digital products leader at Deloitte; Shawn Panson, US assurance transformation leader at PwC; and Melissa Burgum, CAO and corporate controller at Accenture—addressed the PCAOB on the topic at the board’s investor advisory group meeting in late April.

The consensus? AI means “the mechanics of how audits get done are going to change,” as group member Jen Sisson, CEO of the International Corporate Governance Network, put it, and the PCAOB needs to think about what it needs to do differently to respond.

Resources needed. At large firms with the means to make heavy investments in AI, change is happening fast. “The models are getting markedly better and the case for using them stronger every couple of months,” Bible said. “This isn’t a one-year, two-year, three-year cycle.” Tools that could only read PDFs six months ago, Panson told the Wall Street Journal in April, now can process 30 types of data and match information between two sets of records.

Keep reading.—CV

The war in Iran—and its knock-on economic effects—has shaken CFOs’ confidence in the global economy.

That’s according to the Q1 2026 Global Economic Conditions Survey (GECS) by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants and the Institute of Management Accountants. The survey, which has existed for more than 10 years, was fielded March 3–19 and polled 557 accountants worldwide, 50 of them CFOs.

CFOs’ confidence dropped to its lowest level since the pandemic and was “significantly below its historical average,” the authors of a report on the survey wrote. Accountants’ optimism dipped to its third-lowest level since the survey was first conducted. The only two quarters when accountants felt more pessimistic both occurred during the pandemic: Q1 and Q2 2020.

This quarter, accountants ranked geopolitical instability as the risk factor that concerned them the most—only the second time they’ve done so since the GECS introduced the factor in 2023. Last quarter, accountants ranked geopolitics behind economic factors such as inflation and interest rates, as well as technology and cybersecurity, in their list of risk priorities.

Keep reading.—CV

We asked, you answered.

In a recent IT Brew poll, we asked if you were concerned about the potential of LLMs like Claude Mythos Preview to enable cyberattackers to exploit vulnerabilities, and 66% of you said “yes.”

There’s a good reason for potential threats such as these models to be top-of-mind for IT pros, Heath Mullins, chief evangelist at ExtraHop, said. New models can quickly analyze and interpret massive amounts of data, enabling attackers to infiltrate systems more easily.

But Mullins said he’s more worried about the one-third of IT Brew’s respondents who said they weren’t bothered by the potential for exploits.

“I don’t understand how you could not be concerned about something that has the ability to create such an impact upon not only your organization, but your day-to-day life,” Mullins told IT Brew.

Keep reading.—EH

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