Through ����VR��Ƶ expanding partner ecosystem of legal technology companies and law firm partners, CoCounsel Legal is connected to the tools legal professionals already rely on, from transaction management and case intelligence platforms to enterprise search and specialized practice workflows. This works in both directions: bringing more capabilities into CoCounsel Legal, and embedding CoCounsel Legal capabilities into other solutions, so firms can move faster, work smarter, and deliver better results with connected workflows.��

The outcome is a legal practice that runs the way the practice of law demands: greater speed, sharper insight, and the confidence to deliver.��

A Partner Ecosystem Built on��Shared High��Standards��

Law firms face an overwhelming market of solutions with few reliable ways to evaluate what is trustworthy, what is secure, and what actually belongs in a legal tech stack. ����VR��Ƶ has done that work. Every partner goes through a rigorous vetting process that evaluates their technology, security controls, commitment to data protection, and alignment with the standards legal professionals rely on.��

The outcome is a shared partner ecosystem where legal professionals have seamless access to the intelligence, tools, and connected workflows they need, without the friction of switching between disconnected systems, and without compromising the standards their profession demands.��

“The partnerships��we’re��building around��CoCounsel��Legal reflect how the practice of law��actually works: interconnected,��time‑sensitive, and��outcome‑driven. By integrating intelligence directly into workflows, we help firms move faster and��operate��with greater precision.”

-Steve Assie, General Manager, Global & Large Law Firms, Thomson Reuters

The��Partner Ecosystem��in Action��

��Document Review Inside the Deal Workflow����

Legal teams rely on transaction management platforms to coordinate the work that moves deals forward: collaboration, transparency, checklists, document organization and version control, deal status monitoring, signature page creation and collection, and generating final closing sets. When document review and analysis happen outside that workflow, teams must move files into separate tools and then bring the results back into the platform. This��adds��friction, delays, and the potential for lost context at the moments when speed and accuracy matter most, particularly in time-sensitive transactions.

DealCloser is a transaction management platform used by law firms and in-house legal teams across a broad range of transaction types, including mergers and acquisitions, banking and finance, real estate, venture capital, private equity, restructuring, and other complex transactions. Through its partnership with ����VR��Ƶ, CoCounsel Legal’s document review capabilities are now embedded directly within DealCloser, bringing AI-powered review to the full transaction lifecycle. Teams can analyze contracts, amendments, exhibits, and diligence materials without leaving the platform where the deal is being executed — no manual uploads, no version uncertainty, and no need to reconcile findings across tools.��

: Bringing Firm Knowledge into��CoCounsel��Legal����

Law firms store years of work product across document management systems, intranets, email archives, and other repositories. Their briefs, memos, negotiated agreements, and templates��contain��valuable institutional knowledge that differentiates them. Yet that information can be difficult to surface and apply quickly, particularly when content is spread across multiple systems.����

DeepJudge��helps firms realize the full value of that collective knowledge through enterprise search, AI agents and workflows, and governed access controls. Lawyers can rapidly find, analyze, and apply the most relevant information across millions of documents in��iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint, HighQ, network drives, and many other sources.����

The partnership between DeepJudge and ����VR��Ƶ connects this institutional intelligence to CoCounsel Legal. Whether attorneys are working in Microsoft Word, CoCounsel, Westlaw, or Practical Law, they can use DeepJudge to rapidly retrieve and synthesize key language, facts, and precedent from internal documents and work product, making firm knowledge available in CoCounsel Legal for research, analysis, and drafting workflows. Firm precedents and external legal authority are accessible and actionable in the same workflow, with existing permissions and ethical walls carrying through.��

: Practice Management and Legal AI in One Ecosystem����

Small and mid-sized law firms often have too many disconnected tools. When practice management, document storage, legal research, drafting, billing, and document analysis live in separate systems, lawyers spend time on administrative friction instead of legal work, and lean teams with tight margins feel that cost acutely.����

Smokeball is a cloud-based practice management platform built for small to mid-sized firms, covering intake, matter management, automatic time capture, billing, and client communications. The combination of��CoCounsel��Legal and Smokeball unites deep legal content and advanced AI with comprehensive practice management, powered by technology that understands both the substance of legal work and the mechanics of running a firm.����

Smokeball matter documents can now be brought directly into��CoCounsel��Legal in bulk,��eliminating��manual uploads and the��version��confusion that comes with moving files between disconnected systems.����

The result is a more continuous workflow from matter management to substantive legal work. Attorneys can use CoCounsel Legal to rapidly analyze, draft, and research with their actual matter documents at hand, grounded in authoritative Westlaw and Practical Law content. This is just step one in a joint roadmap creating a unified ecosystem for small to mid-sized firms.

A Law Firm as Co-Developer

The partnership with Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox, one of the leading intellectual property law firms in the United States, takes a different form. Rather than a product integration, this is a co-development relationship in which the firm’s practitioners worked directly alongside Thomson��Reuters��engineers and editorial teams to build a specialized workflow inside��CoCounsel��Legal.��

The focus is Section��101��patent eligibility, a question central to most utility patent disputes, deeply precedent-dependent, and historically requiring significant associate time with no guarantee the research was complete.��

The resulting Patent Claim Eligibility Analyzer inverts the traditional model of legal technology development: instead of practitioners receiving a finished product built by technologists, Sterne Kessler co-developed it from the start, translating the firm’s own Section 101 methodologies into a scalable workflow now available to patent practitioners across��CoCounsel��Legal.��

: Connecting Case Intelligence to Legal��Strategy����

Personal injury cases are won or lost on facts, and facts live in unstructured records that take too long to organize and are too easy to get wrong. Medical records, treatment timelines, damages calculations, liens, deposition summaries: plaintiff firms are managing all of it, under pressure, against better-resourced opponents.��

Supio Agent changes the equation at every level. At the case level, it ingests every file, every system, every data source the firm runs on and executes the work: medical chronologies, damages summaries, causation analysis, and case-specific drafts grounded in verified facts. At the portfolio level, it surfaces what’s urgent, what’s behind, and what needs to move. At the firm level, it gives leadership real-time visibility into case quality, intake patterns, and institutional knowledge that previously lived only in attorneys’ heads.��

Deep Research with Westlaw Advantage is available natively inside��Supio��Agent, invoked when legal research is needed, running in parallel, and surfacing findings directly in the workflow.��

The result:��Supio��builds the record, compounds the knowledge, and works with Westlaw to verify the law, delivering defensible work product at a scale no case-level tool can touch.��

A Growing Partner Ecosystem��

Thanks to ����VR��Ƶ partner Anita, German legal research content is now part of the CoCounsel Legal experience, providing authoritative guidance for Germany-based and international teams. A recent document connector integration with practice management solution Litify creates a fast track from matter files to substantive legal work product. ��

Document storage integrations launched early this year with Box and Dropbox extend that reach further, making it easier for firms to work with their documents wherever they live. And with Outlook search now enabled within CoCounsel Legal, users can simultaneously surface and apply relevant information from their email, Westlaw, Practical Law, and other connected sources, all without leaving the platform.��

The��practice��of law looks different depending on where you sit, from solo and small firm practitioners managing tight margins and lean teams, to large global firms and corporations navigating complex,��high-stakes��matters. The��partner��ecosystem is built to serve that full spectrum, meeting legal professionals where they work with the connected intelligence and seamless��workflows��their practice demands.��

As the��legal��profession’s needs evolve, so��will��the��partner��ecosystem.��For lawyers, that means more capability, more connectivity, and more of the intelligence they need,��wherever their work happens.��

Learn more about CoCounsel Legal

For our��customers,��flexibility is powerful. Work can begin in��the��environment that is most natural for the task at hand. But it also creates a critical challenge: as work moves across more tools, models, partners, and interfaces, how do professionals��keep track of what happened and why?����The��final output��must��be��accurate, transparent, secure, and defensible.��As AI moves from answering questions to planning, acting, and coordinating work across tools, the system behind the interface matters more than ever.

That question is becoming more urgent as AI changes the speed and scale of professional work. The gap between what is plausible and what is correct, between what is fast and what can be trusted, is widening. In legal, tax, audit, and compliance, that gap is not theoretical. It creates real consequences for clients, organizations, markets, and reputations.

At ����VR��Ƶ, we call the standard��required��for this work Fiduciary-Grade AI:��AI designed for professionals whose work��is subject to regulatory oversight��and duties��of care��and where��accuracy,��confidentiality, and��accountability��are critical. In the agentic era, that standard becomes even more important because AI is no longer only generating answers. It is beginning to��help��plan work, use tools, coordinate steps, and help complete complex tasks.��And it is increasingly dependent on many interconnected AI technologies, models, and agents working together to produce a final work product.

That is the standard we are building CoCounsel��to,��as it evolves into an��agentic��operating system��for��the professions we serve.

CoCounsel is designed to meet professionals wherever high-stakes work happens. Often, that means starting and completing work directly in CoCounsel. Increasingly, it also means making CoCounsel accessible across the broader ecosystem of tools, models, platforms, and partners our customers already use.

The goal is simple: put��Fiduciary-Grade��AI��at the fingertips of our customers, wherever professional work begins, and ensure that when the work matters, it can be trusted.��That is what we mean by an��agentic��operating system: not a single agent, chatbot, or workflow tool, but a trusted system that can bring together content, context, tools, models, verification, and human oversight to help professionals move work forward.

Starting Work Is Easy. Finishing It Is What Matters.

AI has made it easier than ever to begin work. A prompt can generate a draft, summarize a document, surface��a possible answer, or move a task forward in seconds.

But in professional environments, starting work is not the hard part. Finishing it��accurately��is.

This need is especially visible in legal, where professionals must ground their work in trusted sources and stand behind the results.��When work carries consequences, when it needs to stand up in a boardroom, before a regulator, in an audit, or in court, what matters is how that work is grounded, verified,��validated, and made defensible.

That is the role CoCounsel is designed to play.

Trust in professional AI cannot be treated as a feature added at the end.��It has to be built into the system itself.��Outputs must be grounded in authoritative, continuously maintained sources. They must be shaped by domain��expertise. They must include mechanisms for validation and transparency, so professionals can understand, verify, and stand behind the results.

This is what separates general-purpose AI from��Fiduciary-Grade��AI.

General-purpose AI can be extraordinarily useful for exploration, brainstorming, summarization, and productivity. But high-stakes��professional work requires more than a plausible answer. It requires systems that understand the domain, apply trusted sources, respect privacy and security obligations, and support the human accountability that��remains��at the center of professional judgment.

We are seeing this first in legal. CoCounsel Legal combines advanced AI with ����VR��Ƶ trusted legal content, workflows, and��expertise, including Westlaw, Practical��Law��and��KeyCite,��which can be applied to��customers’ own documents and work��product. It is designed not only to help legal professionals move faster, but to help ensure their work can be trusted when it matters most.

As Elizabeth F. Salsedo-Surovov, Director of Knowledge Management and Information Resources at Robinson & Cole LLP, recently said:��“We’re really excited to be using [CoCounsel Legal] Deep Research… we are using it in Westlaw through our partnership with ����VR��Ƶ, in our��on-premise��AI environment to pull in the Deep Research reports so that people are not doing research in the��ChatGPTs��of the world, they’re doing research in Westlaw. …��Utilize��the trusted��resource��and tools of Westlaw to do your legal research.��Don’t��rely on other AI tools.”

That customer perspective captures the shift underway. Professionals are not just asking for faster AI. They are asking for AI they can rely on.

Building Across the Customer’s Ecosystem

The next generation of CoCounsel is being built for that reality.

CoCounsel will continue to be a primary destination for professional work. For many customers and many workflows, the best experience will begin inside CoCounsel itself, where ����VR��Ƶ can bring together content, workflow, context, AI, and various 3rd��party applications and agents��in one trusted environment.

But professional work also starts in many other places. It starts��in��documents, emails, enterprise systems, matter management tools, tax workflows, accounting platforms, customer environments, and increasingly general-purpose AI assistants.����That is why we are building CoCounsel to��operate��across a broader ecosystem as well.

Through APIs, connectors, Model Context Protocol capabilities, and emerging interoperability standards, CoCounsel can be integrated with and invoked from the environments where customers are already working. In legal, we are beginning to��demonstrate��this through our work with Anthropic and Claude, enabling customers to connect Claude with CoCounsel Legal so that work can move between a general-purpose AI environment and ����VR��Ƶ trusted legal AI system.

And this is just one part of the broader strategy.

We are engaging across the AI and enterprise technology ecosystem,��with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, AWS, Anthropic, and other partners, to make CoCounsel available where our customers choose to work.��Through MCP and other integrations, CoCounsel can be accessed from the environments where customers are already working.

This is not about turning ����VR��Ƶ into a passive content layer for someone else’s interface. It is about making CoCounsel available as the trusted professional AI system that grounds,��validates, and completes high-stakes work, regardless of where that work begins.

The same strategy extends beyond��legal. As CoCounsel continues to expand across ����VR��Ƶ, including tax, accounting, audit, risk, and compliance, we are building toward a future where fiduciary-grade AI is available across the professional workflows our customers rely on every day.

What Comes Next

AI is raising expectations for speed and scale across every professional industry. But as the volume of AI-assisted work increases, so does the pressure on accuracy, judgment, and accountability.

The systems that matter most will not be the ones that simply help professionals start��work��faster. They will be the ones professionals can rely on to finish work correctly.

That is the future we are building��toward with��CoCounsel.

We will continue to make CoCounsel a best-in-class destination for professional work. And we will continue to extend it across the ecosystems where our customers are already working, across models, platforms, partners, and workflows.

Because the future of professional AI will not be defined only by who can generate the fastest answer.

It will be defined by which systems professionals can verify, trust, and stand behind.

That is the fiduciary-grade standard we are building into CoCounsel across ����VR��Ƶ.��

At ����VR��Ƶ, we bring auditors advanced audit technologies. and launched in 2025, offering AI-powered solutions to help audit professionals work faster and with greater confidence.

Partnerships are equally central to our innovation strategy, with an approach centered around methodology. When we first shared our , the focus was clear: help firms modernize without asking them to walk away from the methodology they trust and their existing technology investments.

The role of the integrated ecosystem

Audit is not a single workflow, and it won’t be solved by a single tool. Our intention is to meet firms where they are – and give them an experience with best-in-class options from trusted providers that meet our standards for quality and reliability.

An open ecosystem approach makes it possible to bring together specialized capabilities and integrate them into a cohesive experience, with data being automatically shared with partners embedded in PPC. For firms, that means more flexibility in how they adopt new technologies and less need to manage disconnected tools across the engagement.

Today, we’re seeing that partnership vision come to life inside real, integrated audit workflows.

Over the past several months, we’ve been working closely with a curated set of partners to embed AI-powered tools into our . Those integrations roll into , with new automated capabilities available to firms within our software.

Embedding partners within PPC

The impact is most visible in complex, manual areas of the audit where teams spend the most time today, such as lease accounting, proof of cash, and financial statement review — and it’s coming to life through our growing network of integrated partners:

: Lease accounting and specialized workflows

Lease accounting continues to be a complex and time-consuming area for many firms. By integrating Crunchafi into audit workflows, teams can automate lease accounting across FASB ASC 842, IFRS 16, and GASB standards, simplifying complex calculations and generating audit-ready schedules and journal entries directly from source contracts.

“Our clients span a wide range of industries and reporting standards, and lease accounting is one of the areas��where��getting the calculations wrong has real consequences,” said Leander Sico, Partner at Hutchinson & Bloodgood LLP. “Having Crunchafi integrated into Guided Assurance means our team is working from audit-ready outputs tied directly to the procedures we’re following. That connection between methodology and software gives us greater confidence in both our team’s execution and the final workpapers.”

: Automated proof of cash

Our integration with Audit Sight brings automated cash analytics directly into the audit workflows – reconciling bank activity against accounting records and producing audit evidence that allows auditors to reduce or eliminate substantive procedures throughout the audit.

“Audit Sight has transformed how we perform substantive testing,” said Mark Welp, Partner at Holbrook & Manter. “By automating testing of routine transactions, our team can focus on higher-value audit work. The recent PPC methodology updates reinforce that this approach is both practical and aligned with professional standards.”

: Financial statement validation

Financial statement validation and version management are some of the most time and judgment-intensive parts of the audit, but much of the underlying work is repeatable. Through our integration with Trullion, we’re bringing AI-driven automation into math and consistency checks on financial statements, version and prior-year comparisons, and statement structure validation.

“Partnerships drive increased efficiency while enhancing the effectiveness of our audit procedures,” said Mike Reynolds, Partner at Bennett Thrasher. “Trullion and ����VR��Ƶ have consistently delivered on the vision, responsiveness, and execution necessary to solve these key components that differentiate market-leading solutions. Trullion’s financial statement validation capabilities available from ����VR��Ƶ Guided Assurance creates a fully integrated, AI-powered workflow, reducing friction throughout the entire financial reporting quality control process. We know this is just the tip of the iceberg of what this partnership can unlock and we are excited to see what comes next.”

Across each of these areas, the goal is to reduce manual effort, increase consistency, and keep work anchored in a trusted methodology.

Looking ahead

Audit is steadily becoming more automated and data-driven. The opportunity is to use that shift to improve both efficiency and quality, freeing up time for auditors to focus on risk, judgment, and insight.

By continuing to invest in both our own capabilities and this broader ecosystem, we’re helping firms evolve their workflows in a way that feels practical, connected, and grounded in the standards they rely on every day. That’s where we’re focused, and where we’ll continue to push the pace of innovation in audit.

This post was authored by Corey Wells, General Manager of Audit at ����VR��Ƶ

After convening the first meeting of the Trust in AI Alliance, it is clear this mismatch is emerging as one of the biggest barriers to enterprise AI deployment.

As AI systems move from answering questions to taking action inside professional workflows, a fundamental mismatch is emerging. Execution shifts to the system. Responsibility still sits with the human.

In agentic systems, that model is being reconfigured, but there is still no clear answer to a critical question: how does a human maintain accountability as more of the work is executed by the system?����

That question was at the center of the inaugural convening of the Trust in AI Alliance, a group bringing together leaders across model development, infrastructure, and enterprise AI deployment, where participants from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, AWS, and ����VR��Ƶ discussed what trustworthy agentic systems require in practice.

A clear theme emerged: AI capability is accelerating faster than accountability.

Most systems today are not designed for that standard.

The Shift No One Is Talking About

In the first wave of AI, the defining question was whether a system could produce a correct answer. That is no longer enough.

As AI systems take on multi-step tasks across real workflows, the question is shifting from accuracy to accountability.

As Michael Gerstenhaber, Vice President of Product Management at Google, said during the discussion: “Delegating agency to a synthetic agent implies trust. The more you delegate, the more you need observability, tracing, and audit. It is not one feature. It is defense in depth.”

In traditional professional environments, accountability is clear. Humans determine relevance, review source material, verify outputs, and take responsibility for outcomes. In agentic systems, that model is evolving.

Retrieval is automated. Context is lost across steps. Outputs appear grounded in source material without preserving fidelity. Tools execute beyond the user’s visibility.

As Frank Schilder, Senior Principal Scientist at ����VR��Ƶ, noted: “When we move to an agentic workflow, we automate steps that professionals used to perform manually and that introduces new risks: Context can be silently dropped. Source fidelity can become fragile. Maintaining clear accountability becomes more complex.”��

These are not edge cases. They are structural risks.��We are automating the work, but not accountability.

If You Can’t Inspect It, You Can’t Trust It

In regulated industries, trust has never meant blind confidence. It has always meant the ability to verify. That standard is now colliding with how many AI systems��operate.

Accuracy drives experimentation. Inspection determines adoption.

If a system cannot show its work, it cannot be trusted in high-stakes environments.

As Gayle McElvain, Head of TR Labs at ����VR��Ƶ, put it: “Errors create liability. For many professionals, trust means ‘trust but verify.’ That means building AI systems where verification is built in.”

Across the discussion, several consistent priorities emerged around what trustworthy systems must provide:��

• • Step-by-step auditability��
  • Traceable reasoning and inspectable tool use��
  • Durable logs and process artifacts��
  • Clear, persistent provenance��

This is not a feature. It is��infrastructure.

Trust Breaks When Source Integrity Breaks

In knowledge-based professions, trust depends on the integrity of source material.

Agentic systems introduce new failure modes. They may paraphrase where precision is required. They may surface outdated information. They may blur the boundary between authoritative sources and generated reasoning.

These are not cosmetic issues. A single altered word in a statute can change its meaning. A misapplied version of a regulation can create real consequences.

As Zach Brock, Engineering Lead at OpenAI, described: “We are moving toward agents that share durable scratch spaces. Citations, version identifiers, and hashes of source material can travel through a workflow without being compressed away.”

That level of persistence is��not a technical��detail. It is what makes accountability possible.
Without it, professionals cannot trace how an answer was constructed or verify whether it reflects the correct source at the correct point in time. Without it, accountability breaks.

Accountability does not��emerge��automatically from more capable systems. It must be explicitly defined.

As Byron��Cook, Director of Automated Reasoning at AWS, said: “With AI, some of those socio-technical mechanisms go away. We��have to��define the dividing line between behaviors we��accept��and those we do not—and enforce that symbolically. Without that, accountability cannot be��maintained��as systems take on more of the work.”

This Is a Systems Problem

Much of today’s AI development is��optimized��for performance benchmarks. But in real-world environments, performance is only part of the equation.

As Scott��White, Head of Product, Enterprise at Anthropic, noted: “Benchmarks measure whether a model can do the task.��Enterprises are asking a bigger question: will the system around it hold up in the environments where the work��actually happens?��A trustworthy agent��requires��the model, the boundaries around it, and the record of what it did. Getting all three right is what turns AI from a powerful tool into a��system enterprises��can trust with important work.��That’s��what will drive the next wave of adoption.”

Trustworthy systems must be designed to operate safely under pressure, with clear boundaries and strong safeguards.

That requires:��

• • Clear separation between system instructions and external content��
  • Built-in safeguards against prompt injection and data leakage��
  • Continuous monitoring and testing��
  • Audit trails aligned with regulatory expectations��

Agentic AI is not just a model challenge. It is a governance challenge.

The Next Phase of AI

We are entering a new phase of AI adoption, one defined not by experimentation, but by deployment inside real workflows.

The industry is shifting from outputs to systems, from benchmarks to reliability, and from capability to accountability.

But this shift will not happen automatically. It requires new standards for auditability, clearer approaches to provenance, and systems designed to preserve truth and responsibility across every step of a workflow. These are solvable problems—but only if accountability is designed into the system from the start.

The organizations that solve this will define the next generation of AI.

In high-stakes domains, trust is not optional.

It is not a feature. It is the product.

The Trust in AI Alliance was announced in January to bring together leaders across the AI ecosystem to advance practical standards for accountability, transparency, and trust in AI systems. The group will continue to meet regularly, with��select��insights from those discussions shared publicly.��

At ����VR��Ƶ, our starting point is, and will remain, methodology. For decades, firms have relied on ����VR��Ƶ PPC methodology as the gold standard for audit quality, documentation, and compliance. Our vision for AI in auditing builds on that foundation. We’re not asking firms to change how they practice. We’re focused on making PPC the most AI‑automated audit methodology in the market—through our own products and through deep partnerships with innovators our customers already trust.

That’s the idea behind our recent partnerships with , , , , , and . Together, we’re embedding PPC into AI‑driven tools across We’re supporting AI-powered automation with , so firms can automate more work while staying grounded in the trusted methodology they already rely on.

Trullion: Methodology‑aware automation for financial statement review

Financial statement review is one of the most judgment‑intensive parts of the audit—but many of the underlying procedures are repeatable. Our integration with Trullion brings AI‑native automation to financial statement review and testing, with full traceability back to PPC methodology and the relevant guidance at every step.

Artie Minson, CEO at Trullion, describes the shift: “This partnership signals a new era for audit automation and lays the foundation for trusted and truly agentic workflows. Our vertical AI solution is built for auditors by auditors, ensuring our outputs are within the framework of professional standards. This integration creates methodology-aware automation. Auditors can now focus their time on applying judgment to fully evidenced, agentic outputs, rather than searching for them, delivering audits with unmatched efficiency, accuracy, and quality.”

For us, “methodology‑aware” is key: automation is valuable only when it operates within the same professional framework firms already use to define, document, and support their work.

Audit Sight: Substantive analytics that reduce testing

Substantive testing is another area where firms feel the strain. Even when technology is available, many teams still default to large samples and manual procedures.

As T.C. Whittaker, Co‑Founder and CEO of Audit Sight, puts it: “Audit firms are seeking smarter ways to expand capacity and elevate quality without adding headcount. Bringing automated testing together with ����VR��Ƶ’ PPC methodology — and enabling it through Guided Assurance — is the ultimate unlock for auditors. It transforms the audit plan itself, making it intelligent and dynamic by tailoring procedures, eliminating unnecessary tests, and reducing sample sizes based on automated evidence and client-specific risk. This partnership represents a shared vision to redefine how assurance is delivered in the modern era.”

Crunchafi: Automating lease procedures inside PPC

Lease accounting has become a complex, time‑consuming area for many firms. Too often, teams spend hours on calculations and reconciliations instead of higher‑value work.

By integrating Crunchafi into Guided Assurance, we bring seamless lease accounting automation directly into PPC‑based workflows, eliminating manual lease calculations and providing audit-ready journal entries, amortization schedules and footnote disclosures while preserving firms’ established methodology.

Mike Cooke, CRO at��Crunchafi, explains: “Audit teams want efficiency without sacrificing quality. By aligning��Crunchafi’s automation with the PPC Methodology, we’re giving firms a clearer, more reliable way to handle lease accounting from the start of the engagement to the final deliverable.”

This is the pattern we’re aiming for: automation that plugs into how firms already work, rather than asking them to start from scratch.

Fieldguide: Empowering Firms with Flexible Paths to Automate PPC Methodology

Many firms also want a more connected environment where methodology, evidence, and automation all live together. Our goal is to meet firms where they are – and give them options.

That is why we’ve partnered with Fieldguide to embed Guided Assurance—which delivers PPC methodology—directly into Fieldguide’s professional‑grade agentic AI platform. This creates a unified experience where trusted PPC content and intelligent automation collaborate to execute engagements efficiently and consistently.

Whether firms choose to automate audits with ����VR��Ƶ or Fieldguide, they can be confident they’re using the most trusted and automated methodology in the profession. This flexibility reflects our commitment to innovation and the unique needs of our customers.

Jin Chang, Co-Founder and CEO of Fieldguide says: “Firms are under pressure to do more with less. They need trusted methodology and AI agents that work the way they do. By embedding ����VR��Ƶ PPC methodology into our platform, we’re helping firms deliver higher quality work with more consistency and less effort. This partnership reflects a shared commitment to the future of the profession.”

Validis: Data as the foundation for AI‑driven auditing

AI is only as good as the data behind it. For many firms, getting clean, audit‑ready data from clients is one of the toughest operational challenges.

Through , our work with Validis focuses on solving that. Validis powers secure, on‑demand ingestion of client trial balance, general ledger, and subledger data directly into Audit Intelligence. From there, we use AI and machine learning to focus testing on high‑risk areas, segment populations by risk, and reduce the number of items to be tested, with anomaly detection automatically surfacing unusual items and generating the required documentation.

As Jeff Gramlich, Managing Director at Validis, explains: “We’re excited to collaborate with ����VR��Ƶ, a true market leader and innovator, to deliver audit-ready data through our cutting-edge ingestion capabilities. This partnership provides auditors with the data breadth and granularity crucial for effective AI-driven auditing. By integrating our technology into the Audit Intelligence suite, we’re empowering auditors to conduct data-driven audits with enhanced efficiency and risk analysis, ultimately transforming the process to benefit both auditors and their clients.”

Valid8 Financial: Turning evidence gathering into an automated workflow

Finally, there’s the everyday work of matching samples to evidence and documenting that work in a way that stands up to inspection and peer review. This is some of the most manual and time‑consuming work in an audit.

, developed with Valid8 Financial, automates the matching and documentation of samples to supporting evidence, dynamically tracing accounting transactions to banking activity to confirm occurrence. It brings technology traditionally used in advisory, forensic, and financial crime work into an integrated audit workflow.

Brett Suchor, CEO of Valid8 Financial, says: “We built our technology to solve real problems auditors face every day – reducing the manual, time-consuming work of matching samples to evidence. Through our collaboration with ����VR��Ƶ, we’re delivering a faster, more reliable testing experience to audit professionals across the industry.”

The future of Audit

In the next 3-5 years, we’re going to see big changes to the audit profession. Audit is moving decisively toward an automated, data-driven future. Using the right tools to increase efficiency and quality so teams can focus on higher risk areas and deliver better outcomes for clients is paramount.

In today’s environment, firms are being asked to do more with less, navigating tighter deadlines, increasing complexity, and growing client expectations. At ����VR��Ƶ, we are bringing auditors advanced audit technologies, with our��newest audit solutions��increasing efficiency and accuracy.

We’ll keep investing in our own AI capabilities and in this partner ecosystem so firms can modernize at their own pace, on their own terms—without walking away from the methodology that has served them well for decades.

This post was authored by Dave Wyle, General Manager of Audit at ����VR��Ƶ.