Agentic AI Rewrites SOX Testing
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What is Midship’s agentic AI and how does it cut SOX testing from 16 hours to 15 minutes?
Hello, I'm Richard Chambers, and welcome to another episode in my podcast series speaking of risk and audit. Joining me today is Kieran Taylor, the co-founder and CEO of Midship. A company that just made real waves across the industry with its recent acquisition by Optro. Kieran's team developed a genic AI that can take a sixteen hour SOX testing process and finish it up in under fifteen minutes. It sounds pretty cool. And now he's at the forefront of the industry's shift toward autonomous controls. Kieran, it's great to have you on the show.
Thanks so much, Richard. Likewise, great to be here.
How did Kieran’s career path lead to creating AI solutions for internal audit?
Now, Karen, can you tell our listeners a little about your background and how did you get into creating a Gentic AI solutions for internal auditors?
Yeah, absolutely. So I actually spent the first couple of years of my career at Deloitte in London, which makes everyone think I was in audit from from the start. I was actually an engineer there working alongside some of my peers going through the audit track. After I moved across to the US, I was working at Instacart for two years prior to their IPO. So we were doing a lot of socks readiness programs for the data platform we were working on. At that point, I saw firsthand some of the pain which my Colleagues and peers were experiencing. And at the same time as that, OpenAI just started releasing access to their APIs to start building these freeform AI products. We were asked by the management to work on some hackathons to say, what's the most painful problem you think you can solve right now?
To me, the most obvious thing was SOX control testing. So we started building some internal things to try and build that out. Eventually realized this was a big enough problem to take it to the market. And so decided to start midship to actually go and solve that problem.
That sounds pretty cool, pretty exciting. Well, you know, Karen Midship was rapidly gaining traction as an independent AI native SOC solution. Uh, beyond tech, what did you see in the Optro leadership and vision that uh convinced you that they were the right stewards for the agentic AI technology you and your team had built?
Yeah, absolutely. So it was the overarching vision of actually becoming the system of action for every point in time piece of technology that was being being built out right now. So right now, ourselves, all of our competitors are taking one particular cycle, one particular bit of work and trying to automate that completely with AI agents, these point in time utilities.
How does Midship’s autonomous testing engine integrate with Optro’s control‑management platform?
The next step is how to unif unify that and synthesize it across a full audit management program. program. And so we thought to ourselves, we either have to take on the really big swing of trying to build it ourselves, or we get to go join the market leader who's already doing this and already has this vision for building it together. So I think a couple of those conversations with the team just made it really clear that it's not just a short term, hey, how can we automate this one thing? It's to build that th that synthesized platform, which is really going to solve that, that, that whole problem.
Sounds like You guys zeroed in on one particular aspect of internal audits mission and really got that right. So that's that's pretty exciting. How does midship's autonomous testing, in your in your opinion? How does the the autonomous testing engine plug into Optro's existing control management solution.
Yeah. So one thing we get for free out of the box by just plugging straight into the audit board optro API is we get all the control definitions and all that management of exactly what the program look like. On top of that, we will take past work papers from previous testing cycles and essentially reverse engineer them to enrich those controls with a detailed description of how you actually go about testing them in practice. So this is one place. Place where teams will manage this in multiple different ways.
Will native Excel support remain a priority after the Optro acquisition?
Sometimes it lives inside of an Excel workpaper, Word documents, freeform PDFs. There's various different ways.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Midship’s agentic AI and how does it cut SOX testing from 16 hours to 15 minutes?
0:08–0:45
2
How did Kieran’s career path lead to creating AI solutions for internal audit?
0:45–2:25
3
How does Midship’s autonomous testing engine integrate with Optro’s control‑management platform?
2:25–3:42
4
Will native Excel support remain a priority after the Optro acquisition?
3:42–5:59
5
What is an AI agent in audit and how does it provide auditable evidence?
5:59–7:29
6
How does Midship ensure an audit trail for AI‑driven conclusions?
7:29–9:13
7
Which SOX control areas see the biggest automation lift and which still need human judgment?
9:13–11:01
8
What will the role of internal auditors look like in 2030 and what skills are needed?
11:01–15:33