Internal audit professionals see AI moving beyond writing and summarization into core audit work, but most functions have yet to reach formal or broad adoption.
More than 2,000 internal audit professionals responded to polling conducted during the October 6 Wolters Kluwer TeamMate webinar, Beyond Chat Bots: The Evolution of AI in Internal Audit. Asked how their audit functions are using AI today:
- 43.8% said individual experimentation.
- 22.4% reported approved use cases within their departments.
- 17.7% reported either a formal AI program or broad adoption across the function.
“AI can be a contributor, but it can never inherit the auditor’s accountability,” said Jim Pelletier, Lead Product Manager at Wolters Kluwer TeamMate. “The human has to be ultimately accountable and responsible for what ends up in your work papers or whatever you’re working on with AI.”
Auditors see AI moving deeper into the audit lifecycle
The polling suggests auditors see some of AI’s greatest potential in substantive audit work. When asked where AI could create the most value for their teams, 38.2% selected planning and risk assessment, while 31.2% chose evidence review and fieldwork.
During the webinar, Pelletier described an evolution from using AI to generate content toward supporting decisions, guiding work, executing bounded tasks, and ultimately identifying patterns and insights across audit information.
“The more consequential the decision, the more important context, control and review become,” he said.
Trust in agentic AI has more than one dimension
Respondents were nearly evenly divided on their greatest concern about agentic AI:
- 29.6% cited data privacy and security.
- 29.3% cited the quality and accuracy of AI outputs.
- 27.5% cited overreliance and the loss of professional judgment.
Pelletier said responsibility and professional skepticism must remain with the auditor as AI takes on more work. He emphasized that AI used for assurance needs to be explainable, traceable, governed, grounded in trusted information, and human directed.
Governance and AI literacy top the agenda
Those concerns are also reflected in what respondents identified as their most important next step. 35.1% prioritized establishing AI governance and acceptable-use guidance, while 28.9% selected building AI literacy across the team.
For Pelletier, the longer-term opportunity goes beyond working faster. He told attendees that AI’s greatest impact on internal audit could be helping auditors transform assurance information into actionable intelligence while keeping professional judgment at the center.
About the polling: The polling was conducted among attendees of the October 6, 2026, Wolters Kluwer TeamMate webinar, Beyond Chat Bots: The Evolution of AI in Internal Audit. Between 2,078 and 2,327 attendees responded to each of the four polling questions. Results reflect the views of webinar participants and should not be interpreted as a representative survey of the internal audit profession.
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Tags: Accounting, Artificial Intelligence, audit, audit AI, Technology
