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The Audit Podcast
Ep 273: AI, Gamification, and the Future of Internal Audit w/ Aadesh Gandhre (DTCC)
00:51:54
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- [00:00]
A
Yes, I think there is a perception issue of internal audit as a profession. Not just, you know, in a single firm, but across the globe. Right where, you know, unfortunately we are the victims of our own doings. Where maybe, you know, some of the auditors may have fallen in love with their findings.
- [00:18]
B
Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Audit podcast. I'm your host, Trent Russell and today on the show we have Adesh Gandre. Adesh is currently the chief Audit Executive at the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, AKA the dtcc. Prior to that he was the Operations technology and Clearing Technology global head of audit at Goldman Sachs, was the Managing Director, group Head of audit IT operations in Latin America business and the Chief Innovation Officer and currently also he serves as on the Finance and Audit committee for Hope Store New York. Hope Store New York. For those that don't know they seek to end domestic violence and to empower victims to achieve safety, independence and healing from the trauma of abuse. If you follow adesh on LinkedIn, if not highly recommend it, there's a lot of good stuff about what he's doing with his team that he puts on there. Some pretty innovative and a team building exercises you could call it. Also a lot of fun it seems like they have on that team. But give him a follow there. You'll see where, where I'm going with this is Adesh's perspective on branding, internal audit and how he's able to do that within his organization. And then obviously if you follow him on LinkedIn, you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. Also to that point, Adash and his team won the Innovator award from Protiviti. So Protiviti does this award, I think last year was the first, maybe second year. For those that are interested, I believe it's closed for this year as the date of this recording. But you can search Protiviti Innovator Award and keep that in mind. Recommend your team or someone else you know that's doing something really cool. So anyway we talk about, okay, what project did you actually do that won that award? So there's some other really good folks on there. Alan Moran has been on the show. His team took home an award also from Principity. So really cool stuff. Sign up for that, get on their email list so you can keep track of what's going on there. And then we also talk about just with change. I mean I thought tech changed quickly until AI hit and now it's difficult to keep up. And so we wanted to get Adesh's thoughts On how he stays up to the latest and greatest so that he continues to be innovative in his role, how he spends his free time. And then there's this concept of freeze, unfreeze, freeze when it comes to change management. And again, this isn't it. Audit change management. This is org change management, people. Change management maybe is a way to say it. So Adesh walks us through that and just kind of his perspective on change management and making it effective. With that said, here we go. Is there a prompt or we can just even more, maybe more broadly, say AI use that you could share with the audience, maybe a professional one and then maybe a personal one also could be something relatively novel or something you're just like, I rely on this every single day now or constantly or weekly or whatever it is. But just something to kind of spark other people's brains.
- [03:22]
A
Absolutely. So we are a heavy copilot shop. So we rolled out Copilot Studio across the whole firm. And I was one of the early adopters in the firm and was. Was very fortunate to experiment with it. So there is one agent that I've created which is mirrored after me. It's my Persona where I uploaded, I linked a lot of my thought leadership in the past, things that I'd like to talk about. I have certainly access to my emails. You can connect emails through the Copilot Studio. That's the beauty of it being a Microsoft product. And before I go, let's say, on a speaking engagement, that's the agent that I go to. I bounce off the ideas, I brainstorm. It's almost, you know, it feels weird that you're talking to yourself, but. So it's not a prompt, but I think that's an agent which has tremendously helped me. And you know, one of the ways that I try to do this is let's say if I am going to meet audit committee. And I had a message that I wanted to deliver, but I wanted to bring in some of the context that clearly Copilot or any other LLM that retains the context has the luxury of retaining larger memory than let's say we as human beings can do. I was able to spot some of the blind spots that, hey, I did not think about that. So it has helped me in my work life for sure. In terms of the prompts, we as an audit department ran a promptathon recently, which was quite an amazing experience for the whole audit department. And through that promptathon we have uncovered a variety of prompts which are now reusable. And there has been A huge focus on how do we improve the work paper quality, how do we improve the QA program. And I think these are the opportunities that exist everywhere. Any audit shop you go to, any firm you go to, they can always be improvements. Right. But where the prompts are getting really impactful is, you know, its ability to detect, hey, you know, these are your policies. This is what, you know, you're expected to document, but you haven't documented to that level. So, you know, identifying it proactively so that it doesn't become an issue later. So we should, we've seen some significant upgrades there. In terms of my personal use. You will laugh about it, but you having your 7 year old kid must be getting a lot of invites, birthday invite, or there is this event in the school, this is the time. And like you, I'm pretty sure you have a separate calendar for your kid. I have separate calendar for my 9 and 7 year old. And it's a pain, you know, creating that invite in the calendar. So I've been using for many, many months now, you know, Gemini. So Gemini, because it links into my Google calendar where I scan or, you know, I have a screenshot of the invite and then I let Gemini do its trick. It goes through, identifies what the event is, what the time is, what the details are, and it does directly connects into my Google Calendar and adds the invite. That in itself has saved me so much time, Trent. You know, it's just unbelievable. And it was just me just exploring, hey, can it do it? And yes, for sure it was able to do it.
- [07:00]
B
Okay, I got questions about that because we, I'm like, calendar to death around this household. To the point I was never like a huge calendar person. I mean even like public accounting, I've just, you know, personal life, I never, you know, I just know it was all in my head until I realized a little bit of a tangent here. This is years ago and you know, it was like a Thursday or Friday night. And I told my wife, I was like, hey, I'm going to go do this thing. And she's like, well, it's not on the calendar. And I already put this other thing on the calendar for me. And I was like, well, that was six weeks ago. You put that on there. And she's like, yeah, I know, but if you grab it on the calendar first, that means you have to stay home and watch the kid while I go out. And I went, oh, this is how this works. Okay, so anyway, since then, so maybe the past six, seven years, very diligent on the calendar. And so that's why I'm curious about this. So, like, I know if, like, if I get something like an invite. So this kid invited my kid to their indoor swim party the other day, and we declined it because I was like, hey, everybody, we're gonna take a quick break from our guests. And if you need to get analytics or AI actually working in your internal audit department, or if you already have some of it, you feel like you're not really getting exactly what you need out of it, you know, there's more you're not getting that. Go to the show Notes, look for the Green Skies analytics link. Click it on the website. There'll be other links that you can click that'll take you directly to a calendar to schedule time. It's literally three clicks to get the time scheduled to get it figured out. All right, back to the show. Even know who this is. And he's like, yeah, we're not friends. And I went, fine, we're not going. That's ridiculous. Um, and so anyway, I know, like, in there, like, we declined it, but I think there's an option in there where I could have been like, you know, where Jim and I would have been like, hey, do you want to add this? And you click yes. And it would have done it. So this is separate from that. This is like, if you get something else, you just take like, a picture and then. And then it adds it for you.
- [08:52]
A
Okay. So many times you get flyers in their, you know, back.
- [08:57]
B
Oh, especially school stuff. Yep.
- [08:58]
A
Right. And then, you know, then you have to type all that stuff in. If it is coming through my Google or let's say Evite. Those already have options to download it to Google Calendar. I'm talking about all the various flyers or the birthday invite that you get through physical copies. It makes your life so much easier. I mean, there's already OCR scanning in your iPhone. I'm sure it's there in Android as well, but where you can copy, paste. But then the multiple steps that you will take, go to the cloud calendar, create an invite, copy paste, go to that calendar. The time, the day, date. It's not worth your time or my time. Let Gemini do its trick.
- [09:39]
B
Excellent. All right, well, I'm passing that along to the misses later today. So AI aside. And I'm sure that's going to come up later, but especially more like on the soft skills thing, which is still. I feel like there's obviously huge benefits with AI, but I think one thing that might be happening is too much Reliance on it and people still don't, you know, it's like with data, like, oh, data's the answer. It's like it's still the soft skills, um, or someone referred to it power skills one time. I like that way. But anyway, I know that just servant leadership in general is big for you and that's like, that is who you are. So I want to see for, for maybe those that are have maybe gone like, oh yeah, I'm familiar with that. I heard that. Or context wise, I get what that means. But I want to see if you could share some examples of that mindset and how, how you being a servant leader has benefited your team.
- [10:30]
A
Absolutely. So it's one of those, I feel my strengths where to be able to listen to your people, understanding what the pain points are and just being an ear to them is very important. It's an extremely important quality of a leader. So how it has benefited me overall is knowing what the problems are so that we can solve it together. One of the things that I did notice in my previous roles as well, that we as audit profession obviously are going to be critical of each other. There's going to be the mindset of okay, let's go find something. And that's also something that I'm trying to undo in many ways where instead of us being that spotlight, I'm now trying to use the terminology of US Audit as a lighthouse and not a spotlight. Let's show them the way so that the management, the firm can navigate and you're not just identified one small issue out there. Similarly, I think people in audit have seen this so many times that they forget to celebrate small wins. It's very important to celebrate the small wins. So we created in here in DTCC Audit Team a channel. It's nothing but a simple teams channel where it's called audit recognition. You know, kudos. Where every day, let's say, you know, let's say if somebody helps me in a walkthrough or somebody helped me with some prompt that I was stuck on and spent extra time and you know, obviously it created some efficiency for me, but this is a small win that historically would have gone unnoticed. I think we are now trying to put the light on it. So essentially it's about the social media culture where we are giving each other kudos. It being a teams channel, there's a live reactions and people comment and it creates a contagious culture where if you get recognized today, I'm sure you're going to go and find the other person. That you're going to give it back. So that's the culture that we've created here. And I'm sorry, super active myself because I have to lead by examples in this case. But I feel like I'm there to serve my department, my people. If they are not growing, I'm not growing. So it's certainly a V culture that I support. And the other way that I have realized that a lot of people are afraid of making mistakes. One of the hurdles that people have in innovating is what if I fail, right? What if I fail and my leaders are going to have a different opinion of me, et cetera. So I've been very vocal about how failing can actually be beneficial. And I heard this in one of the leadership training, which has stuck with me forever. The word fail, which is the first attempt in learning, you just use that acronym and put that in your mind and it has a completely different meaning altogether that you fail. But that's your first attempt in learning and then you improve, right? Of course, you keep on making the same mistakes, different story. So if you give your people an opportunity to experiment and fail and not make big fuss of it, I think you will see those people thrive, innovate. And that's what we're noticing here. So there's a huge focus on creating a positive culture. We ran an internal audit Scott, talent show a couple of weeks back where people stepped out of their comfort zone, performed in front of their colleagues, and I was up there on the stage playing my guitar myself because it's not just something on the wall for me, it's also an opportunity for me to explore some of the skills I've been learning. So that's really the culture that I feel, you know, has. Has really reaped a lot of benefits for us and we are not stopping.
- [14:55]
B
Okay, should have done this earlier probably on my end. Can you just. Context of team size, location, remote, all that kind of stuff. So as you're talking and going, yeah, we had this talent show and somebody goes, all right, we have 200 auditors. I don't know how that would translate for us or, you know, whatever the case is, but just some way we can make it, the conversation relatable to other size teams or smaller teams and larger teams.
- [15:19]
A
So at DTCC internal audit, we are about 100 people globally. So our primary locations are, you know, Jersey City being our headquarters. We do have a location in Tampa, Dallas in the US and we have couple of locations in India, Hyderabad being our new site in India. And then we have an office in Chennai and then we have a center in Manila in Philippines. So, you know, that's our global presence. I think DTCC as a firm, we are, you know, obviously widespread across the globe with all the different products that we have. And this is a team that, that's looking into all the global products and services that we have. And, you know, it's not. The global presence is not done from the perspective of the fall of the sun. I mean, we do have people in our, you know, India and Philippines location also leading some of the audits, you know, at global levels. But, you know, we do see the benefit of having your task force spread, spread across the globe because, you know, it's a continuous flow separate from what.
- [16:32]
B
We'Ve talked about so far. And by that I mean, I don't really have a good segue for this, which tends to happen. What's your perspective on brand for internal audit and how you go about promoting internal audit? And I know there's, there's somebody that's talking to either yesterday or the day before. I can't remember if I've already talked about this on a podcast. Oh, it was a webinar. I already mentioned this. Where they are, their background is it, I'm sorry, is data. And they've been in audit now, I think for two years, going on three. And so they fixed all the, all the stuff, all the data issues. Everything's like centralized. It's relatively clean now. Like you can actually use it. And so. But he was talking about, he's like, yeah, 2026. A big thing for me is to make sure that we as internal audit are not necessarily seen as internal audit the way that is typically seen and changing the perspective and that he, this is like a data guy. He's saying this, you know, like, that's what I feel like one of the biggest hurdles we have is. So that's why I'm even more interested in your perspective on this. I know you do a lot. Side note, if you don't follow adesh on LinkedIn, there's a lot of good stuff. I don't think I saw the talent show, but I know I've seen other, like, oh, there's this other cool team thing that they've done recently. So if you want like, more ideas, go to his profile and just start scrolling and you're going, oh, that's cool. We could, we, we could do that. We could do that. So be sure to do that. But just talk about that, the branding, how you do it. Obviously you do it through LinkedIn. But even internally I think would be really important and the impact maybe it's had and has it changed the perception for some of the, we can call them clients or auditees or you know, however you guys refer to them.
- [18:06]
A
Absolutely. So, you know, huge believer of a brand. You know, I, I'm carrying my brand of DTCC right here in the video. So, you know, that's, that's, you know, by purpose. Yes, I think there is a perception issue of internal audit as a profession, not just in a single firm, but across the globe, where unfortunately we are the victims of our own doings, where maybe some of the auditors may have fallen in love with their findings. This is the term that I first heard when I joined internal audit as an accidental auditor. If you know my story, I did not mean to be in internal audit. I wanted to be a developer. I come with computer science background and somehow landed in audit. And first thing I heard, you know, here is, hey, we're going to have a competition of the best finding of the month. And you know, if I think now in, in hindsight that was so wrong that, you know, you're, you're trying to encourage your auditors to go and find something so that they can win the award. And you know, that's, that's how the perception get set. Right. So the way, the way I look at brand is. Brand is something where people talk about you either positively or negatively when you are not in the room. Right? That's, that's when you, you, when you say that your brand has been created. So if I, if I, you know, we did one session with our HR here in our global summit. You know, I wanted them to come in here and do a topic of brand. And you know, I'm not going to name these products, but they, they displayed just the logos on the screen and there were reactions in the room. And the moment you see the logo without any context, people either did boo or they did, oh, wow. Right. So there is an image that gets associated with your brand and that carries forward. So essentially what we try to do within DTCC is again shed light on many cool things that we do and such as, I'll take an example. So we do this thing called AI Cafe. Okay? This is an air cafe where we have people across the firm. They come in, they showcase some of the cool things they're doing with Gen AI or any use cases or prompts. I was invited as a keynote speaker and I'm like, I'm not going to go there. Just as A keynote speaker. I'm going to go and showcase some art of the possible. So I ended up developing some apps for my day to day purpose which I still used replit. I don't know if you are aware of relet. So again, no code, low code. Having the technology background really helps. But I wanted to show people who don't have coding background that hey, you can do this too. And that creates, these are the examples that creates an image where, hey, actually audit can be innovative. They have people who can think about technology and how you adapt it in your day to day. So these are the examples in which we are trying to cultivate an image internally that we are one of the innovative audit functions, in some cases even leading those initiatives in the firm. We had an innovation showcase which is not specific to AI, but any innovative approaches that you can have. And Audit in the last two years in a row has had a table in person for that innovation showcase where we have showcased some of the cool tools we are using, how we are using data analytics. And then you have the whole firm kind of visit those stations and they see audit there in the middle of all the other projects from the IT teams that sends a message. So certainly big believer of the brand. And brand is something that gets, you know, you carry it forward. So, you know, I'm also encouraging our teams to, let's say both internally as well as externally, you know, carry the brand, cultivate a brand and be authentic. Right. I've seen many people use the lingo that, you know, you, you can straightaway tell that, you know, this is not who the person is. So I'm not going to connect with that person. So, you know, you also need to create a brand in a way where you're very authentic. And then, you know, people, people would like to hear more, you know, from you. So internally, those are the ways we do it. Yes, externally I'm very active on LinkedIn, you know, not just the thought leadership on internal audit, the cool things on digital assets. You know, we as a firm are expanding heavily on the blockchain aspects and so, you know, very active around those technical topics. But yes, the big focus is on people and you know, those, those are some of the cooler ways that we are trying to cultivate that culture.
- [23:02]
B
I could see how like a staff, a senior, a manager would go, okay, the perception is on the CAE to change. That's not really us. And I could see the CAE likely going, you know, saying like, yes, part of this is on me. But then being like, you are the ones that are in the field all the time, like, you have more, you connect to more people than I do. It's really kind of up to you. Where do you fall on that? And I mean, I know you well enough at this point. You're not going to be like, yeah, up to the, the team. I've, you know, it's totally on them. But I mean, realistically at. I, I feel like it is a leadership thing that they should. It's an initiative if nothing else. And those need to be pushed by leadership is that. I think we can all agree on that.
- [23:45]
A
I, you know, I, what I realized is there was a lot of inertia. You know, there's a lot of inertia that, you know, some of the people who've been here longer, they had all great people, great skills, but, you know, we did not have the right focus on, on how do we cultivate the brand, how do we promote the brand? Yes, there were a lot of cases where I had to take initiative to create that brand, you know, be vocal, be a broken record on many of these things. But now I've seen, I've seen a trend within intern audit where we now have a branding and engagement group. You know, there is a separate team who are auditors in their day job. But, you know, they, they also are focusing on how do we elevate the brand of internal audit. So, you know, their primary focus is on, okay, let's create the set of, let's say, activities or, you know, thought leadership articles that we need to publish so that there is a calendar, you know, a calendar of these events that, you know, it's a methodical approach and not an ad hoc approach. It's a very conscious effort creating that brand. So now I have seen those initiatives being taken by the team members across all levels. And we are also seeing our newest batch of analysts who joined. They're coming up with some of these ideas that are amazing, where there's no inhibition. They don't have an inertia. They're coming in, hey, can we do this? So we implemented something that came from our edge analyst, her name is Ashita, where she said, let's create a platform where we are also recognizing the contributions from the auditees on a specific audit. Where we created this thing called internal audit, highlight auditors, auditees, where it's not about the rating of the report and the independence. We are going to do the objective assurance testing. But at the end of the day, if there were things where we can give kudos to both sides of the table on, let's say either the innovative approaches auditors had or how supportive the auditees were or maybe they were self identifying the issues timely. Let's create this channel where you are also recognizing that. So that idea came from an analyst and we implemented that and it got very positive feedback. So that is what I'm seeing now. So that that brand, you know, is something which should not be a burden on only the cae, but everybody needs to step in now. You're not going to get 100% of people on board with it, but as long as you have the majority of them taking it forward, you'll be successful.
- [26:41]
B
Or the oddity. Kudos. There is something I know I do like an internal QAR one year and the something from there suggested or I think we talked about as a team, like, yeah, we always like tell the auditees or the clients like this is what you did terrible at. Like what, what I think we're supposed to also be like, hey, you also did a really good job on that. You know, like if we test 15 controls, you felt two. That's all they ever, you know, we'd ever really hit on. And instead we should be like, look, out of these other 13, you're absolutely crushing it, you know, or whatever the case is. I think even formalizing it even more to the way you guys are doing it is fantastic. It sounds like, all right, I got my segue ready this time. It sounds like there's a lot of innovation within the team and I am pretty positive that comes from you and top down. But I know that it was also recognized externally through our friends, your friends at Protivity also, where they recognize you guys as the internal department and you won this innovation award. I wanted to see if you could talk specifically to the degree that you can about the project that they went. Of all the submissions they got where they went, all right, this is the one. This is the good stuff.
- [27:50]
A
Absolutely. So I'm proudly. I don't know if you can see it in the back. That's the audit in order award we got early this year at the GAM conference. So because we submitted the idea, I'm okay to talk about it. I think this may help spark some additional innovation in the other functions. So the idea that won us the award was the gamification of learning. So we created a leaderboard where depending on, let's say, your activities, whether you completed a training, whether you delivered a training, whether you created a data workflow that helped you in an audit test, there are different Streams in which you can submit that this is how I feel that I have checked off this particular task that gets me the points on the leaderboard. And there's a process, we created a governance around this where people carefully look at the submissions and accept the relevant submissions so that it doesn't become a lot of noise. And then every quarter we announce the winners. And you essentially are trying to create competition, but a friendly competition within the audit department. And I'm a huge believer of gamification. I do this at home with my kids. If I want to teach them something, let's create a game out of it. And that's how they learn. So yes, a lot of that does come from who I am. I am a very curious person. I used to play a role of chief Innovation Officer back in, you know, my previous role at SocGen for audit. And you know, innovation can just be a word I can write on the wall and you know, it looks cool, but no, it needs to be on your day to day basis. Right. So the example I talked about, you know, me implementing games in relet or new apps in relet that comes from that, you know, curious, innovative mindset which doesn't by the innovation doesn't always have to be technology. It can be a completely non technology oriented innovative approach. But you need to think differently. So yes, I think we won the award based on our gamified learning use case and we are also obviously in this year's competition that I think they closed the submissions few months earlier. So we have submitted some of the ideas. Waiting to hear where we land there. But you will always see DTCC going forward. Internet team participating in this competition because that's not a good to have, it's a must have.
- [30:46]
B
I think on the innovation front that was a huge topic for us in 2020, 2021. I feel like just on the podcast it just seemed like on LinkedIn it's kind of interesting to see those trends if you think about it over time. So I think like 2020 was maybe all about being your authentic self. Like everybody had an opinion that on LinkedIn. And then 2021 I think was, I think it was innovation somewhere that was in there and there was something else. I forget what it is or what it was. But anyway, on the innovation front, total, total tangent there. I mean I remember being an FTE for an internal art department and we were going to have to travel to do these like walkthroughs. This is like pre zoom. Pre. I mean zoom was there but it was pre pandemic so zoom was still just like. I mean, I remember jumping on zoom calls and everybody have their video off the entire time and be like, no, this is just like a conference. This is just like a new way we do conference calls. I thought we'd turn the video on, but okay, which is interesting now because I feel like most of the time people turn their videos off on zoom calls. But anyway, so instead of having to travel to do this, I went, hey, what if we just like did the zoom thing and we recorded it? And that way, because we were having to take screenshots throughout, you know, it was like a automated control. I was like, that way, if nothing else, we don't have to sit there and go, hey, can you take a screenshot of that? All right, stop now take a screenshot of that. So it was more. We don't have to think about that. The control owner doesn't have to think about it. You're just going to tell us what you do, you're going to show us what you do, and then we can interject and ask questions to clarify and then all that's captured so we don't have to come back for additional screenshots, as if we missed one. It's in the video. We don't have to come back, typically for additional questions because the notes are the video. And that was relatively simple. And I think it was born mostly out of frustration of having to, like, constantly go back for more audit evidence. And we went, let's just record this thing and then we'll be good. So it can be, of course, it doesn't have to be a tech thing, although this one kind of is. But also just. It doesn't have to be something crazy extravagant either. Like, our idea was record the meeting. That was it. Which is, you know, six years now. And especially with AI and all the recording we can do is hardly innovative anymore. But anyway, I just. I like to make the point that innovation doesn't have to be just like brand new, crazy novel idea. It can be something very, very simple, as long as it makes an impact. But you have all these projects going on. Like you've mentioned the AI cafe, the talent show, the gamification. We call it a project, and I'm sure there's plenty. So these are just the ones that you've kind of just mentioned, naturally, without even kind of trying to dig into the other ones. So how do you, especially with a team as large as yours, how do you spend your time and maybe even prioritize to go like gamification I think was kind of like your natural wheelhouse. So you went like, yep, let's do that. But like talent show where somebody came to you with that. How do you go, yes, we should do that and here's how we're going to carve out the time for it. So I'm asking this in a couple different ways. Take it however you want to, but how do you spend your time? Let's just say in the office.
- [34:03]
A
Yeah. So, you know, one of, one of the, you know, main things for anybody in a role like mine is to be connected with the team, listening in, what the pain points are. So we have created, it's a forum called Team Hurdles. And this actually idea came in from my ea, who Aidanya. So she came to me saying, you know what, why don't we create a platform where instead of it being a quarterly town hall where you are pushing down the ideas, let's give the platform to the people where they can come in and present to the rest of the department on some of the cooler things that they're developing. So how we spend, how I spend the time with the team is going into some of these team huddle meetings where I'm looking at the innovation happening within the department, I'm looking at some of the key hard hitting examples that they may have worked. And I'm talking about, you know, people across all levels. Right. So we have some of the newer analysts in the last meeting going up there on the stage, the podium and delivering a presentation, you know, to the team. My hidden agenda through that is to also break the eggshell for many of them who may have had this fear, the stage fear of, you know, being there and presenting, which I know I had, I had, you know, growing up in India, you know, when I first joined Goldman Sachs as an auditor, it was daunting. It was daunting to see so many people kind of jumping all over each other and I was being that respectful person, quiet, waiting for my turn and the turn never came many times. So I had to step out of my comfort zone to express myself. And I'm trying to create that platform here for some of this junior people who are just starting their career, but I'm just so inspired to see their confidence and ability to deliver. So these are the ideas that I'm all ears to. Not that we are implementing everything that's coming our way, we obviously prioritize, but there are some exceptional people on my side who always come up with some of the new ideas. The talent show again came from my ea And I was all up for it because that actually does play a huge role in their day to day. Because once you free yourself of those inhibitions that hey, how can I be on the stage and play my guitar in front of my colleagues? What if I make a mistake? What if you make a mistake? You know, they haven't paid to be there to watch your show. If they have paid to watch your show, then yes, maybe you should be worried. But you know, the fact that you can be there and be yourself actually is going to help you in your audits. When you talk to your colleagues after the talent show, I like to spend time with the team through some of these collaborative events. Obviously there is the planning discussions, there is the fieldwork discussions, the ideas that we brainstorm on how do we use data analytics? We track our usage of data analytics through certain metrics. So it's an important angle that we look at. So there is a lot of discussion around those. And with my background, my curious mindset, the drive and passion I have for data analytics, I like to get involved in those topics as much as I can. And then I think the town halls are essential. Those are the opportunities where I get to share the strategic direction that the firm is moving towards. The feedback that I'm hearing from the audit committee because they need to know one other thing by the way, the way I like to spend time with my team members is also inviting some of the junior most people to the audit committees with me. So we've created this platform where if somebody had a use case which was hard hitting, deserved a lot of kudos. I tried to create that stage in front of the audit committee who have been extremely supportive of having these people come in and present to them on these ideas because that's also giving them an opportunity to look into, you know, the things as they're functioning. It's not just me going in as a CAE speak and telling them what's what the state of the world is, they're able to listen to people. So you know, that also means that I help these people prepare. A leadership team, you know, in audit is also all very supportive so I can go on and on the whole day because I love spending time with my team. And again that's evident through as you shouted out before on LinkedIn where we also try to highlight how we are building this culture together. One example, you may see this sign, DTCC under the stars. We ran a fundraising effort supporting an organization called Covenant House. They support the homeless youth. There was a sleep out where me and some other colleagues. We slept in MetLife Stadium, braving the cold like the homeless people do so that other people don't have to experience that. I was very proud to see we raised about $40,000 through it. But to me, one of the hidden agenda I had was also to bond with the team. That was an amazing effort doing it as a team, and we were truly impactful. We were actually recognized. We got an award, rookie of the year, because it was our first year, but it's not going to be our last year.
- [39:59]
B
Yeah, I like that initiative and very impressed with the dollar amount raised. For sure, the follow up is around. That's how you spend time with your team. How do you spend your time keeping up with all the changes in technology and maybe even like, if specific resources is mainly where I'm going. Do you have like, oh, I go to this website every day, I check out this podcast, I read this magazine or. Or what, you know, whatever the case is. But how can other people, like, tap into that? I know you're gen. I know you're a curious person by nature, so it's probably you could just like scroll through, you know, Twitter or whatever and then go, oh, I'm gonna read that. I'm gonna read that. I'm gonna read that. I'm gonna read that.
- [40:44]
A
Or build your own app, you know, so I've created an app where it goes through yesterday's news articles and helps me categorize the information for specific themes. And, you know, by the time I come to work, it's already in my inbox. Right. So that's one way of doing it proactively. But, you know, a huge shout out to you, Trent. I think the Audit podcast is certainly one of my key resources where I get to hear from other people. You know, I talked about the most recent, you know, podcast you released with Amrita Kapoor, the CA at Snowflake. I think, you know, you get to not only hear new ideas, but also validate that, hey, we are on the right track, right? So, you know, huge kudos to you, you know, for doing these. I wish secretly that early in my career we had resources like these, but I hope, you know, people who are just starting their careers, you know, do leverage that. So those who listening into this podcast someh through my connections, please do sign up for, you know, Trent's podcast. And this was not scripted, but, you know, the other other resources I do use, you know, we use Gartner. You know, Gartner has amazing articles that we can tap into. You know, the Whole, whole department has access to the Gartner resources. I do use in my personal life, you know for upscaling I use Gemini Research. You know, I do deep research on some of the topics I want to lear. You know, quantum computing is the most recent topic that I've been upskilling on because it's coming, it's coming very fast. You know, we as a firm are doing the post quantum computing readiness assessment. You know, there's a huge focus in our audit plan around it. And I was surprised to see in one of the IIA conferences recently that you know, more than 80% of the crowd had not even heard about quantum computing. And I'm like what world are we living in? Right? So, so yeah, that was mind blowing trend. So I use resources like Gemini Deep Research Perplexity. It has become my Google replacement in many ways. I do Follow the Big Four POVs point of view documents. There's a lot of information in there that you can consume. And all the conferences, you know, let's not really downplay the role that the conferences, the IIA conferences, you know, the audit board conference that I was at recently, you meet with a lot of people, you hear from a lot of people and validate again, you know that you are on the right track or maybe there are some new areas that you can explore. But you know, I'm a huge believer of upscaling. Every year I try to get at least one new certification or complete the, you know, any upscaling track on Coursera. So you know, this year I became, it's a cool certification called Certified Cryptocurrency Auditor. It should have been really called Certified Blockchain Auditor. Right, but maybe it was created in the crypto hype. But you know, it's an amazing certification to not only learn blockchain at a high level, but you know, have your hands dirty playing around with some hashing algorithm and learning more about the mechanics underneath. And then I also did a certification on Certified in cyber security from ISC2 which believe it or not was free and I believe it's still free. So if you want to get any cyber security certification, do check out ISC 2 cc cc. The certified in Cyber Security.
- [44:33]
B
It's a solid recommendation. Just even so on our IA or AI episode that we did, it's basically with the GPT 5.2 when it came out, they're like, hey, cyber security professionals, buckle up because it's about to get really, really bad for everybody.
- [44:49]
A
Absolutely.
- [44:51]
B
If you're looking for job security, that's A good place to hang out. So. Okay, I had one other thing and then we can close the show out. You had mentioned this relative to change management, which I think if we like encircled most of what we're talking about, it is change management. And I know we have it auditors that listen. So when I say change management, I, I mean like program change management method. I mean mindset, change management, not changes in a program, a system or authorized, tested and approved. And there's sod that's. We have this freeze. I'm sorry. Yeah, you have this freeze, unfreeze, freeze idea relative to change management. I just wanted you to explain that in the next few minutes.
- [45:32]
A
Sure. So this is something again, I heard in one of the leadership conferences where it follows a model developed by this philosopher called Lewin. It's a Lewin's three step model to drive change. So the first step is the unfreeze. You know, let's say if you have an idea to drive change, you cannot just go straight away and start making the change right at that moment because you're going to get pushback. And even if people out of compulsion may try to change, it's not going to stick. So the first step is unfreeze. You have to understand the reason behind, you know, the previous ways of doing things. So, so when I took this rollover, I didn't want to bring in change on the first day. I wanted to listen in, absorb. Why are we doing things? Certainly why is the image this way? Why are people looking at order differently? So you have to listen to your stakeholders. You know, those stakeholders can come in different shapes and forms. And as you're listening in, take notes, you know, and understand, okay, this is that reason why things are doing, you know, happening in certain way. Once you have figured out and unfrozen them enough, then you jump into change. Okay, now again, if you are an aggressive person, you would bring in change very rapidly. If you are somebody who is, you know, keeping cautiously, you may crawl before you walk, before you run, but that's the phase that you're going to bring in changes. Now I believe in agility, so, you know, bring in some of the changes, experiment, fail, and then learn from it and do it again. Right? So that's the second phase. And once you feel that you have changed enough, you say that this is my new baseline and then you refreeze. So that's the third stage. So unfreeze, change, refreeze. So there might be different terms that you may hear in the research, but I do encourage you to read on this Luin's three step model to drive change. For me, this has been a huge, huge tool in my kit where not only we were able to change that brand or the image internally, but also externally for DTCC internal audit in general. And I've been a big proponent of positioning audit as a value center because I've heard this numerous times in my career. That audit is a cost center and that's a fact. We are not producing revenue. But then what do you do with this role and responsibility that you have in the firm is really going to define how much do the auditees or your stakeholders are going to rely on you. So positioning audit as a value center, it sounds cool, but you have to really bring it in action. And the change management that we did was also around those angles of how can we change enough so that you can also showcase it. There's an element of branding. So all the topics that I talked about today, they're all interconnected, right? You need support from your people. So you need to be that servant leader. Understand you need to have that right brand. You need to have a vision where you want to go. And then once you marry it all together, then you need to start driving the change and get the feedback. So we do try to proactively get the feedback from our audits. Do they see us as the value center? Right. Do they see us as that lighthouse and not the spotlight? You know, so overall I feel it has been and you know, a great, great success story so far. But you know, we're not done yet. There is so many things that we can do and you know, I'm just excited in this era of constant evolution in technology and, and maybe that again comes from my background, my passion for technology. But you know, there's so many things that auditors can do now that we couldn't do before.
- [49:33]
B
So I'm going to throw the mic to you and let you close this out. I like the way you kind of summarize there at the end about how everything's interconnected. But again, you take the microphone, you close this out. What do you want to leave the audience with?
- [49:46]
A
So I feel couple of the key skills that are extremely important in this, you know, the new era of AI and technology evolution is, you know, being courageous and being curious. So if you are in audit department, I think you are in an excellent place, you know, for people like me who have been accidental auditors. I feel myself, you know, lucky that I landed in this amazing role where the role of internal audit is actually going to be even more crucial as the world moves with the space at which it's moving, where the cyber security risk, technology risks are going to be very important. So be curious, be courageous, you know, don't be afraid of trying new things. Yes, do look at, you know, what the brand of internal audit means, you know, both internally as well as externally. And do work on it consciously. And please, you know, we all in our internal audit profession have a responsibility to really reposition audit as a value center. So do look at what can you do individually that can help elevate the overall profession. And I'm sure you've seen the Vision 2035 from IIA. How can we achieve that not 10 years from now, but in the next few years? But it's an amazing guidebook, so do follow along. It's not just a theory. Bring it in practice.
- [51:16]
B
Hey everyone, thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Audit Podcast. Whatever platform you're listening on right now, I'm sure there's a subscribe button somewhere, so please hit the subscribe button there. If you're listening through itunes or Spotify, feel free to go give us that five star rating. It only took me about 16 seconds to give myself a five star review and it really helps to get future guests to come on the show, so we'd really appreciate that. Lastly, be sure to check out the show notes and follow us on all our social media channels, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, and on TikTok. Also, if you're interested, please sign up for our weekly newsletter from the Audit Podcast. Thank you all. Have a great one.