Can a robot do your audits?

A couple weeks ago, I stumbled across an article from the Harvard Business Review that asked, "Are You Developing Skills That Won’t Be Automated?" The article itself is five years old, but clearly the topic is still a live one: just two months ago, the AI-and-Deep Learning start-up Nanonets updated an article on their website about the use of robotic process automation in internal audits. Much of the discussion seemed to relate primarily to financial audits, but it's only natural for us in Quality to watch the developments closely. 

The Nanonets article emphasizes those tasks at which robots are undoubtedly more powerful than humans: data collection, review for formal compliance (and discrepancies), report generation, and the like. And there is no question that these are areas where automated support is invaluable. While I've never used robotic tools in my own auditing, I've used tools like AHP's iQ-Audit, which automate parts of the report-writing process; and it is always a help not to have to rewrite the same findings and the same boilerplate multiple times.*

But there is more to auditing than just reviewing paperwork and writing reports, even though sometimes in the moment it can be hard to remember that. And here is where the HBR essay becomes relevant. This article looks not at whole jobs per se, but rather at specific skills inside jobs. And it identifies two areas where automation is unlikely.

First, emotion. Emotion plays an important role in human communication (think about [a] physician sitting with [a] family, or [a] bartender interacting with customers). It is critically involved in … nonverbal communication and in empathy. But more than that, it … plays a role in helping us to prioritize what we do, for example helping us decide what needs to be attended to right now as opposed to later in the evening…. 

Second, context. Humans can easily take context into account when making decisions or having interactions with others. Context is particularly interesting because it is open ended — for instance, every time there’s a news story, it changes the context (large or small) in which we operate. Moreover, changes in context … can change not just how factors interact with each other, but can introduce new factors and reconfigure the organization of factors in fundamental ways. This is a problem for machine learning, which operates on data sets that by definition were created previously, in a different context. Thus, taking context into account (as a congenial bartender can do effortlessly) is a challenge for automation.

The key to our question today—Can a robot do your audits?—is that an awareness of emotion and an understanding of context are critical tools for a successful auditor. At some level we all know this. 

We listen to emotions, for example, as closely as we listen to words. You are talking to the Operations Manager and ask to look at his shipping records; he says, "Sure, here they are," and hands them to you without a second thought. Then you ask for his calibration records; his eyelids flutter and he stares at the floor. "The … calibration records? Umm … OK … they're … in this file over here." At that point, is there any working auditor in the world who would NOT go over the calibration records with extra care? Of course we all would.

As for context, that can make the difference between trivial errors and disasters. If the Social Events Committee fails to keep minutes on one of their meetings to plan the New Year's Party, that might rate as an Opportunity for Improvement or you might decide not to mention it at all in your final report. But if a design team holds a formal Design Review—and especially if, let's say, that Design Review is a regulatory requirement in your industry—the very same failure to keep minutes could rate as a Major Nonconformity because of the risk it poses to regulatory compliance. When you have to evaluate the severity of what you have seen, context is everything.  

I think this is good news for auditors, because it means we are unlikely to be replaced by robots any time soon. We might even get them to do some of our paperwork for us. Or at least we can hope.

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* This is not a paid endorsement! 😀