# PCAOB staff reported large audit firms' generative-AI use sitting in administrative and research work, with some firms barring it from audit procedures

Page: https://flyvolo.ai/en/changes/ev-20240701-auditor-2
Date: 2024-07-01 · Stage: Deployment
Can this record move a task judgement? yes
Occupation: https://flyvolo.ai/en/careers/auditor

## Scope

A snapshot from the US audit regulator's own outreach, and the firms are the large end of the market: the US global network firms plus non-affiliated firms auditing more than 100 issuers, which the report says collectively audit the majority of issuer market capitalisation. What was deployed is narrow — staff drafting administrative documents and initial memos, and firm-built tools for researching internal accounting and auditing guidance. The report states current integration 'appears to be focused primarily on administrative and research activities', that some firms do not allow generative AI in audit or attest procedures at all, and that firms expect it to augment rather than replace. It is a regulator relaying what firms told it, not an inspection finding, and it dates from July 2024 in an area the report itself calls rapidly evolving; the global network firms were described as further along than the non-affiliated firms.

## Source

- Public Company Accounting Oversight Board — Spotlight: Staff Update on Outreach Activities Related to the Integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Audits and Financial Reporting — https://pcaobus.org/documents/generative-ai-spotlight.pdf (primary source)

## What this means

The regulator asked the biggest audit firms what they were actually running, and the answer was memos, presentations and guidance search — not the audit. Two things in that are worth holding on to: the firms expected it to augment rather than replace, and some barred it from audit and attest procedures altogether. And this is what firms told the regulator, not what an inspection found.

## What it does not show yet

It does not show a single audit procedure being performed by a machine, and it is not evidence about sampling, testing or risk assessment — the firms drew that line themselves. Nor is it an inspection: nobody checked the answers against the files. Two years on, the honest reading is that this bounds where the line was in July 2024, not where it is now.

## How to verify it yourself

If you work in a firm, find your own policy on what may be uploaded to a generative-AI tool and what it may be used for. The sentence that matters is the one naming which procedures are excluded — and whether anyone has revised it since.


More: https://flyvolo.ai/llms.txt