Published on April 20, 2023
Internal audit is one of the cornerstones of the Organisational Governance System for ensuring responsible organisational governance. The Companies Act 2013 has mandated conducting an Internal Audit of the functions and activities of the company.
Over the years, the internal audit function has evolved as a partner to the businesses in achieving excellence by identifying business risks and recommending controls.
Over the last 10 years, the Tata Group Internal Audit Forum comprising the Chief/ Head of the Internal Audit function across Tata Companies, have been meeting periodically to share best practices and functional knowledge and discuss challenges with an aim to enhance excellence in the internal audit function. On 12th April 2023, Trent Limited hosted a session with experts from TBExG and PwC, to highlight the importance of ‘Data’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in the Internal Audit function.
The session started with a welcome address by Ratul Neogi- Head-Internal Audit, Trent Limited. Thereafter, Deep Seth, Deputy General Manager, TBExG, in his talk, emphasised the importance of the ability to harness right-time data to generate insights, smarter decisions, and more empowered employees. He gave a glimpse of various business excellence frameworks used by TBExG the data excellence journey of the Tata Group using the ‘Data & Analytics Target Operating Model (Datom™)’ - a proprietary framework of TCS that helps companies to discover their current state of data maturity and assists in defining a desired state for the future.
In the following session, Sanjit Acharya ( Executive Director - PwC Tata Group Relationship & Transformation Platform ), Raktim Chakraborty ( Director, Advanced Data Analytics), Abhishek Bharadwaj ( Director, Risk Consulting ), Dr Anshula Pandey ( Responsible for AI - Expert ), Samidh Chatterjee ( Advanced Analytics & ML - Expert ) and Jasnain Singh ( Intelligent Automation - Expert) presented various aspects of Artificial Intelligence and associated application in the internal audit function.
The PwC team gave demos of AI-based technology solutions and frameworks developed for the Internal Audit function and PwC’s Responsible AI Framework.
Participant Speak
The landscape of Governance & traditional control is undergoing a paradigm change. Today ‘Data’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence drive the business environment. For the internal function to stay relevant, it is imperative to constantly keep abreast of the latest developments so that it can effectively partner with the business in sustaining a robust corporate governance framework. Learnings from the sessions today helped to enhance our understanding on use of data and AI in the Internal Audit function!
— S. Bhaskar, Chief Internal Auditor, Tata Capital Ltd.