Reality & Reason

    AI in audit

    Instruments and research for audit committees and heads of internal audit, anchored in the Financial Reporting Council's June 2025 review and March 2026 guidance. Each instrument is designed to be taken into a committee meeting and used on the record.

    Audit Committee Instrument

    Six questions for your external auditor on AI

    One page. Designed to be put to the external auditor in writing or in the audit committee, and to be answered on the record. Drawn from the FRC's four-pillar framework and the gaps the register identifies.

    If the auditor declines to answer at this level of detail, the answer is itself a finding for the committee.

    Download PDF

    Research Register

    Big Four AI Audit Tool Register

    What Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG publicly disclose about AI in audit, mapped against what the FRC has said about audit-tool governance. Ten pages. Evidence-level marked throughout. This is the register the Six Questions draws from.

    Download PDF

    Board-Adoptable Instrument

    Management Information Integrity Framework

    A board-adoptable instrument on AI in management reporting. Designed to be appended to existing governance documents and used to define the integrity standards management information must meet when AI tools have been involved in its production.

    Open the Framework

    Free Tool

    The Residual Logic Scanner

    A free instrument that examines any AI-assisted text and surfaces the framing decisions the model has added beyond what the user asked. Demonstrated live in the Connect London talk on 2 June 2026.

    Open the Scanner

    The underlying research

    The First Annual Reports of the LLM Era

    SSRN, 2026

    A study of language drift in 150 SEC 10-K filings across 2019, 2022 and 2024. The empirical basis for the claim that AI-shaped writing is now present in regulated disclosures.

    Read on SSRN

    The structural dynamics of AI adoption

    A reference of the seven named dynamics that explain what AI does to organisational work, including Residual Logic and the Gravity of the Generic.

    Read the article

    Forthcoming

    • The equivalent register for the second-tier audit firms (BDO, Grant Thornton, Forvis Mazars, RSM).
    • A scan of FTSE 100 audit committee disclosures on AI in their external audit.
    • Named incidents in AI-assisted audit, drawn from regulatory and trade-press sources.

    To be notified when each of these is published, leave your details below.

    Used only to send you the research when it is published. No other use, no sharing, no marketing.

    About This Work

    Reality & Reason publishes governance instruments for boards: documents designed to be adopted, quoted from, and used in formal oversight settings. The audit register and the six-question briefing are the first publications in a sequence on AI in professional services.

    Reality & Reason was founded by Richard Foster-Fletcher, who is also Chair of MKAI, an independent AI research archive. The instruments and research above are part of a sequence on AI in professional services.

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    Richard writes the What Still Matters newsletter on what AI does to organisations. Sign up to follow the work.

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