What is an LLM?

An LLM, or Large Language Model, is a kind of artificial intelligence built to read, write, and understand human language. Sort of like a super-powered assistant that can work with massive amounts of text.

Now, as an auditor, you're constantly buried in documentation. Workpapers, narratives, contracts, emails, you name it. That's where LLMs come in. These models have been trained on trillions of words from books, websites, and code. And through that training, they learn how language works: patterns, context, even the difference between formal financial disclosures and casual internal notes.

But here's the key thing: LLMs don't actually "understand" language like people do. They're not thinking, they're predicting. When you give them a prompt, say, a section of a workpaper, they're using all that training to guess what likely comes next or what makes sense in context. That might sound simple, but the results can be surprisingly useful.

For auditors specifically, LLMs can:

• Quickly summarize lengthy documentation
• Highlight inconsistencies in financial narratives
• Suggest control gaps or missing elements in a process walkthrough
• Draft preliminary audit notes or tickmark explanations
• Help with standardizing client communications

Think of it like this: the LLM does the heavy lifting with language—sorting, scanning, drafting—so you can spend more time thinking critically, applying judgment, and doing the work that really matters.

At the end of the day, it's not replacing you. It's giving you more space to be an auditor.