Navigating the artificial intelligence frontier  

During 2023, artificial intelligence (“AI”) captured the imagination of the world, fuelling discussion among businesses and policymakers by demonstrating the transformative power of how these technologies could redefine work. Whether interacting with vast sources of knowledge and business data through human-like interactions, accelerating how people work, or revealing new opportunities that were not previously possible through manual efforts, the benefits of AI are broad and far reaching.

AI is a broad domain. However, significant attention has been given to a specific field of AI known as Generative Artificial Intelligence ‘’GenAI’’ following the mass global interest in applications like Open AI’s ChatGPT. Recent research by Deloitte shows that a third1(32%) or approximately 4 million people in the UK who have used GenAI have done so for work. Given the opportunity GenAIpresents, and the fact employees are using GenAI ‘side of desk’ for work tasks, it is no wonder that organisations are investing heavily in enterprise use cases.

With the rapid acceleration and integration of GenAI into business functions, AI and accordingly GenAI risk management, will continue to be a hot topic for internal audit teams throughout 2024 and beyond.

For internal audit, this presents two key considerations; how to provide assurance over AI (including GenAI), and how to leverage its potential to evolve and innovate internal audit’s own ways of working. In this publication, we explore these two faces of AI.