AI Agents for Audit: From Chaos to Automated
Discover how Concourse AI agents transform audit workflows by automating evidence collection, variance explanations, and compliance checks
June 26, 2025
The audit process isn’t what it used to be—and that’s a problem. Regulatory complexity is rising, stakeholder scrutiny is intensifying, and yet the underlying audit process remains slow, reactive, and largely manual. As we outlined in our previous post on AI agents for accounting, 87% of accountants report working overtime during the close, and 75% say their workflows still rely heavily on manual effort, raising the risk of audit delays and errors just when precision matters most.
Now, the stakes are even higher. In its most recent inspections, the PCAOB found mistakes in 40% of audits—a warning sign that traditional processes can’t keep up with today’s complexity or speed. Finance teams are being asked to deliver audit-ready books faster than ever, often with fewer resources and tighter deadlines.
This mismatch isn’t just inconvenient. It’s operationally risky. Audit preparation pulls senior accountants away from strategic work, bottlenecks the close, and introduces last-minute stress during the most critical reporting windows. The traditional model—"scramble, explain, repeat"—is running out of runway.
But the real issue isn’t the people. It’s the system. Today’s audit workflows are stuck in a loop: prepare support after the fact, wait for sample requests, and hope nothing falls through the cracks. Meanwhile, the business moves faster, data becomes more complex, and controls become harder to monitor at scale.
That’s where AI agents come in. Not as a replacement for your auditors or systems, but as a new operational layer that proactively generates audit support, flags exceptions, and keeps your team one step ahead. AI agents aren’t just automating the audit checklist—they’re changing the posture of audit itself, from reactive compliance to continuous assurance.
This post explores why audit is ripe for reinvention, how AI agents shift the dynamic, and what it looks like to move from audit season to audit-ready, every day of the year.
Why Current Audit Systems Fail Finance Teams
Audit prep isn’t just slow—it’s structurally misaligned with how modern finance teams operate. While accounting systems have matured, audit workflows remain fragmented, manual, and reactive. That disconnect isn’t a workflow issue. It’s a system failure.
Start with evidence collection. Most teams still compile audit support after the books are closed, weeks or even months after the transactions occurred. This isn’t just inefficient—it’s fundamentally error-prone. When audit documentation is reactive and scattered, material errors slip through. In 2022, Big R restatements—those requiring companies to declare previous filings unreliable—increased by 68%, marking a sharp reversal after years of overall improvement. The cost of getting it wrong doesn't just impact your reputation—it has regulatory implications.
Then there’s the price tag. Traditional SOC 2 audits can range from $15,000 to over $100,000, depending on the scope and complexity. And yet, much of that cost is driven not by the audit itself, but by the internal scramble: assembling evidence, formatting reports, and responding to endless sample requests. Hours that should be spent strengthening controls or analyzing risk are instead consumed by document collection and version control.
This is what fragmentation looks like in practice: transactions in your ERP, approvals in Slack, documentation in shared drives, and variance context in someone’s memory—or someone else’s spreadsheet. Tools like FloQast and BlackLine can help organize the checklist, but they still rely on humans to do the heavy lifting. They don’t pull data. They don’t generate explanations. They don’t surface anomalies before auditors do.
Audit readiness shouldn't be a fire drill every year. It needs to be continuously embedded in daily workflows, rather than being reconstructed at quarter-close. That requires more than another portal. It requires an execution layer that connects systems, automates follow-through, and delivers answers before auditors ask the question.
That’s precisely what AI agents unlock.
What Makes AI Agents Different from Traditional Audit Tools
AI agents aren’t dashboards. They aren’t templates. And they’re not another checklist app.
They’re intelligent software entities that connect to your finance systems—ERP, banking, approvals, and close tools—and execute work the same way a seasoned accountant would. But faster, and without dropping the thread.
In plain terms: AI agents read data, understand processes, and take action. You don’t need to teach them how your GL works or where to find evidence for a journal entry. They’re pre-trained on financial workflows and tuned to the structure of your business. You ask in plain language—“Show me support for vendor payments over $10k last month”—and the agent handles the execution: retrieving documents, compiling entries, flagging gaps, and drafting the narrative behind the numbers.
What makes agents different from traditional automation is context. They don’t just follow rules—they understand the relationship between transactions, policies, prior periods, and business events. They explain why something changed, not just what changed.
Crucially, agents don’t replace your existing tools. They sit on top of them. Whether your team uses NetSuite, QuickBooks, or Sage, agents integrate directly with those systems and start working within minutes. There’s no implementation cycle, no re-architecture, and no retraining required.
This is a major departure from legacy finance tech. Traditional software demands that you adapt your workflow to the tool. AI agents adapt to your workflow.
They’re not a new system. They’re a new layer—turning disconnected data into ready-to-review audit support, without interrupting how your team already works.
Concourse vs Traditional Audit Software
For years, audit prep has forced finance teams into a frustrating tradeoff:
You can stick with manual work—digging through emails, tagging transactions, and building narratives in Excel—or you can invest in structured audit tools that promise automation, but often introduce rigidity, high setup costs, and limited flexibility.
Neither choice is satisfying. Manual work is error-prone and unsustainable. Traditional tools, while helpful, don’t do the work—they organize it.
AI agents offer a third option.
They combine the flexibility of manual workflows with the speed and structure of automation, without forcing you to retool your systems or retrain your staff. Agents sit on top of your ERP and audit stack, execute high-friction tasks in real time, and evolve with your processes. They’re not rigid templates or pre-set flows. They’re dynamic collaborators that adapt to how your team works.
Here’s how the landscape shifts with agents in play:
| Feature | Manual Audit Prep | Audit Tools & Portals | AI Agents |
| Effort Required | High (spreadsheet-driven) | Medium (structured uploads) | Low (prompt-driven execution) |
| Narrative Quality | Manual and inconsistent | Predefined and static | Dynamic and context-aware |
| Evidence Compilation | Scattered and after-the-fact | Semi-automated via checklists | Embedded and real-time |
| Tool Flexibility | Full control but high effort | Rigid structure with low agility | Flexible and works with existing stack |
| Audit Readiness | Periodic and reactive | Project-managed and scheduled | Continuous and always-on |
This is the real unlock: audit moves from being a time-boxed event to a continuous process, from periodic stress to persistent readiness. And you don’t have to rip out what’s already working to get there.
With agents, the workflow doesn’t just move faster. It moves smarter—because the system is doing the work with you, not just watching from the sidelines.
How Top Finance Teams Use AI Agents for Audit
AI agents don’t replace your audit team—they support it by executing specific, high-friction tasks when prompted. Below are real examples of how finance teams use agents during audit prep. Each begins with a simple, natural-language request and ends with a detailed, review-ready output—all without toggling between tabs or digging through shared drives.
Transaction Sampling Support
Pull all transactions over $10,000 from last quarter and compile supporting documentation.
→ The agent queries your ERP, retrieves relevant transactions, and gathers linked documents (invoices, memos, receipts) to build a review-ready packet for auditors.
Variance Explanation
Explain why GL 5200 had a 15% increase versus the prior month.
→ The agent compares period-over-period data, identifies key drivers, and drafts a contextual explanation based on transaction-level insights and historical patterns.
Audit Readiness Check
List all journal entries from March that are missing supporting documentation.
→ The agent scans journal entries, flags those without attachments or audit trails, and returns a checklist of gaps—ready for follow-up or remediation.
Anomaly Detection
Are there any new vendors this month with unusual payment patterns?
→ The agent reviews vendor transactions, identifies deviations from typical behavior, and highlights entries that warrant additional scrutiny.
Workpaper Preparation
Create a workpaper for fixed asset purchases over $5,000 this year.
→ The agent compiles qualifying transactions, attaches relevant documentation, and formats the output according to your audit template, ready for review and export.
Compliance Tag Review
Which transactions are missing department or class tags for Q2?
→ The agent audits tagging completeness across GL entries and produces a summary of items missing critical classifications, helping teams resolve compliance issues early.
Revenue Review
Identify any revenue entries with payment terms longer than 90 days.
→ The agent reviews AR and contract data, surfaces transactions that exceed standard terms, and returns a list of outliers with contextual notes.
These prompts aren’t just time-savers—they’re levers for better execution. Each one translates a manual task into a structured, system-aware workflow. You stay in control, initiating the task when needed. The agent handles the heavy lifting behind the scenes and returns outputs that are complete, accurate, and ready for review. It’s not automation for its own sake—it’s targeted support that makes audit prep faster, cleaner, and less chaotic.
Transform Your Finance Team from Tactical to Strategic
The real promise of AI agents in audit isn’t just efficiency—it’s elevation. By offloading the repetitive, documentation-heavy tasks that bog teams down, agents give finance professionals the space to shift from tactical execution to strategic oversight.
In traditional audit cycles, high-value work, such as control analysis, policy evaluation, and risk mitigation, often gets sidelined. Teams are so consumed with pulling files and assembling packets that there’s little time left to assess trends or strengthen internal controls.
AI agents flip that dynamic.
By prompting an agent to handle the mechanics—such as evidence retrieval, variance write-ups, and compliance checks—accountants can refocus on reviewing outputs, identifying gaps, and surfacing insights that matter.
And the gains are measurable. According to McKinsey, AI-driven scenario planning can reduce time spent on data prep by up to 65%. Gartner reports that companies with high AI adoption see a 75% reduction in reporting errors. In finance, specifically, these benefits are already being realized.
At Concourse, teams using our agents for audit prep have seen:
- Up to 75% reduction in manual time spent gathering audit support
- 3-day reduction in audit review cycles
That’s not just process improvement—it’s capacity unlocked.
The audit becomes less of an event and more of a continuous, low-friction function. Finance teams move from reactive cleanup to proactive oversight. And CFOs get cleaner, faster insights with tighter controls—without burning out their team in the process.
This is what strategic audit readiness looks like: embedded in the workflow, available on demand, and built for the speed of business today.
Why Concourse Leads Finance AI Automation
Concourse builds AI agents specifically for corporate finance teams—including purpose-built support for audit workflows. Our agents integrate directly with your existing systems, including ERPs, close tools, and approval platforms, to help your team execute faster and with greater accuracy.
There’s no need to rip out what’s already working. Concourse agents sit on top of your stack, respond to natural-language prompts, and generate audit-ready outputs in seconds. Whether you’re pulling variance explanations, assembling work papers, or scanning for compliance gaps, agents handle the busywork, so your team can focus on what matters.
Ready to see what agents can do for your audit process?
Join the waitlist or email us at hello@concourse.co for early access
The future of audit is prompt-driven, always-on, and built into your workflow. Concourse agents are ready when you are.
