Grant Thornton announced Thursday the launch of its audit transformation platform called “gtap”—a proprietary audit infrastructure that the top 10 accounting firm says will redefine how it performs audits.
By rolling out gtap, which stands for Grant Thornton Analytics & Automation Platform, the firm says it’s ushering in a new era of artificial intelligence-enabled, agent-assisted audit execution. This approach allows Grant Thornton’s U.S. audit and assurance professionals to continue to move beyond traditional, labor-intensive audit procedures.
In a May 7 media release, the Chicago-based firm explains:
Grant Thornton created gtap from the ground up to operate as the intelligent core of audit delivery. It embeds analytics, automation and AI directly into each stage of the audit lifecycle. And its cloud-based, self-service infrastructure standardizes how audit data is ingested, transformed and analyzed. This creates a single, trusted data foundation that powers intelligent audit procedures, automates workpapers and unlocks advanced analytics.
The gtap infrastructure works with data from any ERP system and replaces historically fragmented tools with a unified, secure environment that enables full-population analysis and delivers audit-ready outputs at scale. It also allows for AI-driven workflows that can automate routine and transactional audit activity. In addition, gtap opens the door to intelligent agents that can surface risks, anomalies and insights in real time — while auditors maintain oversight, guiding the process and ensuring the integrity of the work.
“This represents one of our most significant investments in the future of audit,” Ron Messenger, CEO of Grant Thornton LLP, said in a statement. “We are transforming how we audit and how we serve our clients, moving toward a data-led model that improves both the quality and efficiency of our work. By automating the transactional parts of the audit, our teams can focus their time where it matters most: helping clients by exercising professional skepticism and judgment, assessing risk, and delivering real-time insights that help drive trust in the capital markets.”
Grant Thornton says it will use gtap first with private company audits before expanding into public company audits next year as part of a phased rollout to the full U.S. audit and assurance practice.
With the launch of gtap, Grant Thornton says it’s using AI and automation to raise quality, increase consistency, and significantly change how it delivers value to clients.
“This is not about layering technology onto yesterday’s audit,” Messenger said. “We’re building something entirely different, while reinforcing that our professionals remain in control of the decision-making process and the judgments that matter most.”
The audit infrastructure is designed as the foundation for an agentic audit model where intelligent agents increasingly orchestrate audit activity, continuously assess risk, and adapt procedures as new data emerges, Grant Thornton says.
“As AI advances, gtap will advance with it,” Mike Kempe, chief information officer of Grant Thornton Advisors, said in a statement. “The future depends on delivering audits that have more autonomy, generate better insights, and are more aligned with how modern businesses operate.”
The firm’s gtap technology strengthens audit quality at every level, Messenger said. It enhances the work, but Grant Thornton audit professionals supervise every step.
“By embedding automation, analytics, and AI directly into audit execution, we’re increasing consistency across engagements and reducing variability and manual steps where errors and risk can occur,” he added. “The result is audit work that is more resilient, more repeatable, and more transparent. When you build quality into the process itself, you raise the standard across the board.”
By streamlining how teams receive and process client data, gtap reduces the back and forth that has historically added time to the audit process, Grant Thornton says. This gives clients faster data readiness, earlier visibility into risks and trends, and a more continuous, insight-driven engagement.
“When you put the right tools in people’s hands, they do their best work—and clients feel the difference,” Messenger said.
Photo credit: Grant Thornton
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