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KPMG has integrated generative AI into its smart audit platform, the firm announced in a news release, marking a significant milestone in the accounting sector’s quest to deploy GenAI in the audit workflow.
The company noted that its 90,000 auditors around the world will be able to take advantage of the platform’s AI capabilities.
KPMG first launched its smart audit platform, dubbed KPMG Clara, in 2017, to advance its audit abilities and ensure it could integrate new technologies.
Now, auditors can use the platform’s AI assistant to review documents—making risk identification easier—or to summarize “engagement-specific audit documentation,” according to the release.
Take something like understanding a client’s process flow and testing its controls. Teams can now use AI to review and transcribe minutes of client meetings, flagging potential fraud risks.
“We can automatically convert our conversation into a process flow, so it draws the flow chart on the behalf of the professional. It doesn’t replace the professional,” Thomas Mackenzie, KPMG's global and US chief technology officer, told CFO Brew. Financial reporting professionals can then “identify the controls, and assess [their] documentation of the controls,” he continued.
The whole point of AI developments, Mackenzie stressed, is to ensure these pros can spend more time and mental energy on the output, not the input, while also improving the speed and accuracy of audits.
“It’s creating this space to enable our professionals to have the time to think about outcomes and implications” rather than spend time on routine tasks like populating that a machine can complete “on their behalf more effectively and more accurately,” he explained.
“AI is really important; it’s disruptive, but it’s really a milestone on the journey we’ve been on,” he added.
This particular milestone comes with intense industry demand: A May KPMG survey found that 83% of financial reporting leaders thought it was “important” for auditors to use AI in their analysis, a fast and steep climb from the 61% of respondents who said the same thing in 2023.
While earlier might have framed generative AI as “an exciting, promising technology,” Mackenzie added that it’s now “something that people are embracing. We certainly are embracing it at KPMG, and we’re making it available to our professionals at the same time as our clients are thinking about adopting it.”