Summary5 min read

The Audit Podcast

Episode: IA on AI – How Finance Leaders Are Using AI and What Audit Can Learn

Host: Trent Russell
Date: September 17, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode focuses on how finance leaders are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and explores the key lessons that internal audit professionals can draw from their experiences. Host Trent Russell discusses recent industry reports, emphasizes the importance of having a strategy for AI integration in finance and audit, outlines common gaps in governance and communication, and shares actionable advice for auditors looking to implement AI and analytics more effectively.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Importance of AI Outages and Business Continuity

Third-Party AI Tools Are Not Infallible
- Russell references a recent outage from a major AI provider, Anthropics’ Claude, highlighting that “everyone uses third-party hosting and there’s been outages.” [03:10]
- He connects this to Copilot, noting it's the most-used AI by internal audit departments and drawing parallels to past widespread outages, such as Microsoft’s in 2020-2021.
Recommendations When AI Tools Are Down
- “If Copilot were to go down... I would go tell my auditors: Go build a relationship with somebody. Just… go stop by somebody’s office… [and] hang out.” [04:24]
- Advice for IT audit: Test business continuity plans, review vendor SLAs, especially for critical and customer-facing AI tools, and consider contingency arrangements for AI downtime.

2. Insights from Protiviti’s 2025 Global Finance Trends Survey

Low Adoption and Strategy Rates
- Russell summarizes:
  - 27% of finance organizations use AI and have a defined strategy
  - 20% don’t use AI but have a strategy
  - 47% in total have a strategy
  - 45% use AI without a strategy
  - The rest neither use AI nor have a strategy [06:29]
- Key Risk: “Of course, there’s a risk with finance not having a strategy relative to AI. Even bigger risk with the organization overall not having a strategy within AI.” [07:15]
Using Survey Data as Evidence
- Suggests using industry surveys and infographics as “selling points to stakeholders” for additional resources or to justify the need for auditing AI.
- “You can use this as a way to help yourself get what it is that you need... convincing someone that you need to do the audit or that you need more resources…” [05:57]

3. Challenges with Strategy and Execution in AI Adoption

The Pitfall of Having No Strategy
- Cites an example where a CEO hired 22 data scientists with no direction:
  - “A year later there was not a single product in production because there was no strategy. It was ‘go do data science.’ And similarly, I feel like that's what we're seeing. Well, I know that's what we're seeing with AI and in internal audit… ‘go use AI’, [but] we’re not going to put a strategy around it.” [08:05]
- IA Standards & Structured Approaches
  - New internal audit standards now require a tech strategy, with AI being a major piece.
  - Ad hoc analytics programs often lack structure, formalization, and especially governance. “The governance over the entire program within internal audit is usually where we see the biggest gap.” [09:33]
How a Defined Strategy Accelerates Progress
- Once a clear strategy is established (complete with quarter-by-quarter priorities and estimated hours), progress accelerates:
  - “You start to see individual auditors using analytics and AI significantly more, [and] higher value projects being prioritized.” [10:25]
- Center-of-excellence models can falter without communication and alignment, leading to workload imbalances or silos.

4. Actionable Recommendations

Don’t Overcomplicate – Just Start
- “Even if you aren’t an AI or analytics or tech strategist… I highly recommend typing it up as opposed to just sitting around a table and everybody talking about it. Type it up. Put something together across people, process, technology, and governance.” [12:02]
Seek Expert Help When Needed
- “That is our bread and butter at Green Skies Analytics. So if you need help… reach out to us. We’ll take a look.” [12:38]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On AI Downtime as an Opportunity:
- “Go build a relationship with somebody. Just stop by somebody’s office… hang out.” – Russell [04:24]
On Strategy Deficiencies:
- “A year later there was not a single product in production because there was no strategy. It was ‘go do data science.’” – Russell [08:05]
On the Importance of Structure:
- “The governance over the entire program within internal audit is usually where we see the biggest gap.” – Russell [09:33]
On Documenting Strategy:
- “Type it up. Put something together across people, process, technology, and governance.” – Russell [12:02]

Timestamps for Key Segments

[03:10] – Discussion of recent outages in major LLMs/AI tools and continuity planning
[05:57] – Using industry surveys to influence stakeholders and proposals
[06:29] – Breakdown of Protiviti survey results on AI adoption in finance
[07:15] – Risks of lacking an AI strategy in finance and audit
[08:05] – Example of failed data science adoption due to missing strategy
[09:33] – Common governance and structure gaps in audit AI programs
[10:25] – Positive impacts of developing and implementing a real strategy
[12:02] – Advice on crafting and documenting an actionable AI strategy for audit

Final Thoughts

This episode concisely underscores the importance of intentionality and structure in AI adoption within finance and audit functions. Trent Russell recommends grounding technology initiatives in concrete strategy, improving governance, leveraging external data to make the case for AI investment, and not hesitating to bring in expertise when needed. The message: AI isn’t just about buying tools—it’s about building a sustainable, governed program that delivers real value to the business.

For more resources and to connect with Green Skies Analytics, visit the show notes and greenskiesanalytics.com.

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[00:00]
A
Welcome to the IA on AI Podcast, part of the Audit Podcast Network, where we bring you weekly updates on AI from the internal auditor's perspective. Here we go. Hey, everybody. Just wanted to make a quick announcement. September 24th and 25th of 2025 is the Audit analytics and AI Conference. It's the only conference dedicated to internal auditors strictly around data analytics and AI from the audit perspective. The goal, when we have speakers, come on, Is to have them show you how to do a lot of this stuff and talk about how they've been able to accomplish the things that they're going to show tactically. So it's not just this is why you should do it, it's a lot of how you should do it. It's all virtual. So if you're in a time zone halfway across the world, no problem at all. You can absolutely check out the recordings. This year you can get 14 CPEs and then two additional free CPEs. You have to come to the conference to check that part out. We have another fantastic lineup. Highly recommend. Go to the show Notes, go to the website, check out the lineup, check out the topics that we have for you this year. Again, September 24, 25th, 2025, depending on when you're listening this, that means it's either 14 days away, eight days away, seven days away, one day away, or it's the day of. So go to the website, check it out, register, and hope to see you guys there. All right, here we go. From TechCrunch, anthropic reports, outage, Claude and Console impacted. So Claude is one of the other kind of major LLM or gen AI tools, if you're not familiar. So there's like Chat, gbt, Copilot, Llama, Claude Gronk, all those. Right. They all kind of swim in the same circle. So this shouldn't be like a major surprise to anyone. Everybody use third. Everybody uses third party hosting and there's been outages. And even I remember, I don't know, I think it's maybe 2020 or 2021. There's a big, like, Microsoft was down for the most part. And so everybody's like, well, really nothing I can do. And so to that point, I was thinking, if Copilot were to go down, which is what most people. We've been talking to internal audit departments. That's what most people are on. If it went down, I would go tell my auditors, I would go, look, it's down. Go build a relationship with somebody. Just if you're in the office, go stop by somebody's office maybe that you have a good relationship with already or one you feel like you need to work on and go in there and go hey, copilot's down, I'm not doing anything for the rest of the day. What are you up to? And then just hang out. And then I would go to the next person and do the exact same, exact same thing. Like I said for these other providers that you rely on for service similar controls as you would for any gen AI or LLM. Test business continuity plans for sure vendor SLA for these like critical AI tools, especially if it's customer facing, making sure you're in good standing there. Consider any contingency arrangements for any other, you know, kind of sudden AI service downtimes. Anything along those lines from our friends at Protiviti Charting the future how CFOs are navigating change with technology and foresight so this is a report. If you're looking at our screen on Spotify or on YouTube you can see if you go to the link, check out the show notes, go to the link, download the report. Don't think you even had to put any information. Nope. So you don't have to put in email or anything like that. So from the report and it's the 2025 Global Finance Trends Survey report. First of all, if you are like that is 40 pages long, there's a good chance I'm never going to read any of that. Totally fine. I get it highly suggest that you do productivity puts out a lot of really good stuff. But also when you have to make some kind of business proposal for why you need additional resources or something like that or you need really more selling points to stakeholders on we need to audit this thing. Especially AI related. Here's some additional context of why here's you know from this survey we use a lot of surveys or at least we speak about a lot of surveys on this show and that's one reason why as well is you can use this as is you can use this as a way to help yourself get what it is that you need. Whether that means convincing someone that you need to do the audit or that you need more resources to do an audit etc. These can definitely be good. And to do that, I mean it's a quick just scroll through look for all the really nice looking infographics and pretty charts and then go yep, I could use that. So the main thing I wanted to point it out here is in Figure 5 if you're looking at my screen it's finance Organizations employing AI. So the question asked was, is your finance organization currently employing AI, including generative AI and or agentic AI. So if you're looking at my screen at Figure 5 where it says finance organizations employing AI, the question asked was, is your finance organization currently employing AI, including generative AI and or agentic AI? So 27, 27% said yes and they have a defined strategy. 20% said no, but they have a strategy. So 47% have a strategy and the remaining don't. And they're either using AI, deploying AI and don't have a strategy, which is 45% of folks, or they're not using AI, not deploying AI and they don't have a strategy. Of course there's a risk with finance not having a strategy relative to AI, even bigger risk with the organization overall not having a strategy within AI. So we need to consider that and go talk to those stakeholders and be like, hey, kind of need a strategy. It's the same thing with data. You see it all the time with data and analytics. Where, hey, we hired, I've told this story before on maybe the audit podcast. There was an organization, they hired 22 data scientists, like Brilliant Data Scientist. And the CEO said, go do data science. And a year later there was not a single product in production because there was no strategy. It was go do data science. And similarly, I feel like that's what we're seeing. Well, I know that's what we're seeing with AI and in internal audit where it's, oh, we got to use AI, go use AI, we're not going to give it, we're not going to put a strategy around it. A couple things around that. One the standards now call, the IA standards call for some kind of technology strategy. So AI is going to be a big piece of that. And the other thing is when we look at and review AI and analytics strategies for organizations and then really help beef those up and make them actionable and reasonable as well as in reasonably can be reasonably accomplished in the timeframe that we set. A lot of times these ad hoc programs, it's like, yeah, you have this, you know, some continuous monitoring maybe going on. If you have maybe a full time analyst or two, or definitely don't have to have that. But typically that's what you see. And then it's just kind of this ad hoc almost mess of analytics. There's very little structure around it. The formalization of the processes are very, very lacking. The governance over the entire program within internal audit is usually where we see the Biggest gap. And pretty quickly, once we develop a strategy for someone, you can see from that quarter to the next quarter where they've implemented what we recommended. Highest priority for this quarter. Here's a timeline. Here's hours estimate. You agree? Yes or no? Yep. Okay, you can all get this done. We're going to check in at the end of the quarter kind of thing. The amount of progress that gets made is fantastic. You start to see individual auditors using analytics and AI significantly more. You start to see the higher value projects being prioritized. And so it's not just, oh, I think this thing would be cool, I'm going to work on it, or especially when there is maybe a center of excellence. So you have maybe one, maybe two analysts on the team and they are either flooded with work and trying to juggle multiple projects and so they lag takes longer than it should to get done. Or due to the lack of communication, lack of data literacy and AI literacy between the auditors and the DA AI team, they're like, I don't really have a ton going on because they don't talk to me. I can't talk to them. And there's a huge disconnect. So all that to say, even if you aren't a AI or analytics or tech strategists. Strategist. Then sit down. I highly recommend typing it up as opposed to just sitting around a table and everybody talking about it. Type it up. Put something together across people. Process, technology and governance. That is our bread and butter at Green Skies Analytics. So if you need help with that, reach out to us. We'll take a look. Thank you for listening and be sure to follow the link to greenskiesanalytics.com in the show notes and schedule time to see how Green Skies can make the hype of AI a reality in your internal audit department. All right, that's it for this week. We don't really have a catchy slogan to end the show yet, so if, if you have one and you want to send it to us, we'll be happy to include it. And if we get a bunch, we'll just do a different one every single time. But until then. Well, I don't know until then because we don't have anything to leave the folks with yet. So have a good week.