Let me start with a real-life story.
The CFO of Solectron, Kiran Patel, held an all-Finance meeting in one of our manufacturing plants in Milpitas, California.
At the end of the meeting, a lady who had been with the company for many years approached him. She asked whether Kiran found the report she sent him every month useful. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t think of a report he got from her every month. So he asked her what it was about and where she sent it.
The answer was astonishing. It was a report on a part of the business that was dormant, and she was sending it to the email address of a former CFO.
The business had moved on. She had not.
That is the danger for internal audit.
Technology, including AI and robotics, is in the process of reshaping the world – and that includes our world: the one in which we live and work.
In the same way that business and their processes are evolving, internal audit needs to evolve. Auditors also need to evolve – in line with the business.
I am not talking about internal audit learning to use AI. No. We should do that, but first we need to know why we are even here.
We exist to provide assurance on management’ processes and controls.
Those processes and controls are in the early stages (some are more advanced than others) of a radical evolution. Experts have…
