The audit profession stands at a transformative crossroads. As regulatory complexity intensifies and client expectations soar, audit professionals face mounting pressure from time-consuming manual tasks, increasingly intricate compliance requirements, and the persistent threat of burnout.
Enter the AI-human partnership — a revolutionary approach that’s reshaping how audits are conducted. Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Audit represents the pinnacle of this innovation, offering audit professionals a powerful ally that transforms traditional practices while preserving the irreplaceable value of human expertise and judgment.
Jump to ↓
The evolving role of audit professionals
Traditional audit processes have long been characterized by labor-intensive manual work: endless hours spent on data gathering, document review, and routine compliance checks. These time-consuming activities, while necessary, often consume 60-70% of an auditor’s time, leaving limited capacity for the strategic analysis and business services that truly differentiate exceptional audit professionals.
The result? Auditors find themselves trapped in cycles of repetitive tasks, with diminished opportunities for meaningful client engagement and professional growth. This reality has created an urgent need for technological advancement that can liberate audit professionals from routine work while amplifying their analytical capabilities.
Introducing CoCounsel Audit: A game-changer
Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Audit is a revolutionary agentic AI-powered solution specifically designed for the audit profession. It leverages advanced artificial intelligence to automate repetitive, low-value tasks that traditionally consume vast amounts of auditor time. From intelligent data extraction and automated document review to pattern recognition and anomaly detection, CoCounsel Audit handles the heavy lifting of routine audit procedures with unprecedented speed and accuracy.
As Carson Chen, senior audit manager, at Sensiba LLP, explains, “CoCounsel is like my assistant or staff that actually understands accounting and tax language. You can ask it complex technical questions in plain English, and it will give you a very clear citation-backed answer, often with the relevant ASC guidance on the right side. It’s pretty fast, consistent, and it helps you to solve problems while learning along the way.”
Key capabilities and benefits of CoCounsel Audit
Audit-ready citations and documentation
CoCounsel Audit generates verifiable, audit-ready citations for every step of the process, linking findings directly to trusted sources and underlying evidence. Its documentation is clear and accessible, offering plain-language explanations that facilitate both internal review and external validation, ensuring transparency and defensibility at every stage.
Agentic task execution for complete workflows
Going far beyond simple Q&A, CoCounsel Audit streamlines audit workflows by automating multi-step procedures, coordinating document requests, and adapting to evolving project needs. While it significantly reduces manual effort and enhances efficiency, it is designed to support auditor oversight, ensuring professionals remain in control of high-value analysis and client engagement.
Integration of internal audit methodology and resources
The platform seamlessly incorporates your firm’s established audit methodologies, templates, and historical workpapers into its processes. By centralizing these critical resources, CoCounsel Audit shortens the time-consuming “swivel chair” research across multiple systems, ensuring consistency, accuracy, and compliance while reducing administrative overhead.
Seamless audit workflow integration
CoCounsel Audit is designed to work with existing audit workflows and technology stacks. Its compatibility with major audit software and document management systems enables effortless adoption without disrupting established practices, allowing teams to benefit from AI-driven insights without sacrificing familiarity or control.
What sets CoCounsel Audit apart is its thoughtful design philosophy: it’s built to complement human expertise. It provides auditors with AI-powered insights while preserving their critical role in professional judgment, client relationships, and strategic decision-making. This symbiotic relationship between artificial intelligence and human expertise creates a powerful multiplier effect that elevates the entire audit process.
CoCounsel for audit professionals
Reclaiming time: From manual tasks to meaningful work
CoCounsel Audit transforms the audit landscape by automating specific manual tasks that traditionally drain auditor productivity. It excels at intelligent document analysis, automatically extracting relevant information from contracts, invoices, and financial statements while flagging potential areas of concern. Its advanced data processing capabilities can analyze vast datasets in minutes rather than days, identifying patterns and anomalies that might escape manual review.
Consider the transformation: instead of spending hours manually reviewing transaction details, auditors can now focus on interpreting AI-generated insights and developing strategic recommendations for clients. Rather than getting bogged down in routine compliance checks, they can dedicate time to understanding business risks and providing value-added services. In the words of one pilot program user at Plante Moran, “CoCounsel has saved me significant time … STRONGLY recommend that we purchase on a permanent basis.”
Eliminating common audit time-wasters with intelligent automation
While the advantages of an AI-powered audit platform are manifold, the impact becomes most apparent when considering the challenges that traditionally consume auditor hours.
CoCounsel Audit is designed with a deep understanding of these recurring challenges, targeting core activities that have historically drained productivity and focus. By addressing these bottlenecks, CoCounsel Audit doesn’t just automate tasks — it redefines what’s possible in modern auditing.
What manual tasks can CoCounsel Audit help to streamline?
Trial balance analysis: Seamless Excel integration
Navigating complex trial balances is a foundational yet labor-intensive aspect of every audit engagement. CoCounsel Audit’s Excel integration enables auditors to import, analyze, and reconcile trial balances and subsidiary ledgers directly within the platform.
CoCounsel Audit can help to identify discrepancies and flag potential irregular entries — helping to reduce tedious manual cross-checks and freeing up auditors to focus on evaluating the underlying business implications. Bulk data can be mapped with a few clicks, helping to ensure both accuracy and completeness while helping to reduce the risk of human error.
PDF document summarization: Smart file analysis at scale
Reviewing contracts, invoices, and supporting documentation in PDF format often requires hours of painstaking reading and note-taking. CoCounsel Audit’s advanced file analysis capabilities revolutionize this process by:
- Automatically summarizing key terms,
- Extracting relevant figures, and
- Highlighting potential risks or anomalies
Whether it’s a 40-page supplier contract or a year’s worth of bank statements, CoCounsel Audit distills actionable insights within moments. Auditors can receive concise, plain-language summaries that support rapid decision-making and facilitate seamless review with clients and team members.
Risk assessment preparation: Guided, evidence-based workflows
Preparing thorough risk assessments is essential for tailoring audit procedures, but compiling the necessary background, documentation, and justifications can be a significant time sink.
CoCounsel Audit offers guided workflows that prompt auditors through each stage, leveraging client data, industry benchmarks, and historical analytics to suggest relevant risks and appropriate responses. It documents the rationale behind risk ratings and recommended audit plans, ensuring that every assessment is both rigorous and defensible — without the need to start from a blank slate or sift manually through disparate files.
Client file reviews: Powerful before/after comparisons
One of the most challenging aspects of audit work is performing comparative analyses across client periods or sets of financial information.
CoCounsel Audit excels at delivering “before and after” comparisons, automatically aligning prior year and current year documents, highlighting significant changes, and flagging discrepancies for further investigation. This capability enables auditors to quickly spot trends, outliers, or unusual transactions that warrant deeper review, transforming what was once an arduous, manual process into an efficient, insight-driven exercise.
 |
|
Elevating audit quality and client insights
The true power of CoCounsel Audit lies in its ability to uncover deeper trends, anomalies, and insights that traditional manual processes might lack. Its AI-powered analysis can process enormous volumes of client data, identifying subtle patterns and correlations that provide unprecedented visibility into business operations and financial health.
For example, when auditing a retail client’s inventory processes, CoCounsel Audit might automatically identify seasonal fluctuations in inventory turnover rates across different product categories, flag unusual vendor payment patterns, and highlight potential internal control weaknesses — all while the auditor focuses on understanding the business implications of these findings.
This enhanced analytical capability enables auditors to provide clients with tailored recommendations and strategic guidance that goes far beyond traditional compliance reporting, positioning them as trusted business partners rather than mere compliance checkers.
Reducing burnout and enhancing work-life balance
The audit profession’s reputation for long hours and high stress is directly linked to the burden of manual, repetitive work that characterizes traditional audit processes. CoCounsel Audit addresses this challenge head-on by automating the routine tasks that contribute most significantly to auditor burnout. As another pilot program user at Plante Moran put it, “This (CoCounsel) is really a great tool and has helped a lot with being more efficient at technical research. It would be greatly, greatly missed if we were to not pursue the technology and lose access.”
When AI handles data extraction, document review, and initial analysis, auditors can work more efficiently and focus their energy on intellectually stimulating, high-value activities. This transformation not only reduces stress but also promotes a healthier work environment where audit teams can maintain better work-life balance while delivering superior results to clients.
The future of audit: Embracing the AI-human partnership
The future of auditing belongs to professionals who understand how to harness AI efficiency while applying human judgment and expertise where it matters most.
CoCounsel Audit exemplifies this evolution, allowing auditors to take on more strategic, value-added roles that leverage their unique capabilities in relationship building, and critical thinking. ”One of the most meaningful impacts of this software on our firm is to give us the real opportunity to embrace AI in a software responsible way. The mindset around AI is just as important as the tool itself, and CoCounsel helps us to shift that mindset,” says Chen.
As the audit profession continues to evolve in response to technological advances, those who embrace AI-human partnerships will find themselves at the forefront of industry transformation, delivering exceptional value to clients while building more fulfilling careers.
Transform your audit practice today
CoCounsel Audit is redefining audit excellence by creating a powerful partnership between artificial intelligence and human expertise. Ready to transform your audit practice? Discover how CoCounsel Audit can provide the clear path forward.
