AuditEx — the Audit Experience program.
Audit has fought measurement twice. The regulator’s quality-indicators project was shelved; its firm-and-engagement metrics rule was adopted in November 2024 and withdrawn within months. Both failed the same way: the metrics graded people. AuditEx runs the inversion — the field’s first instrument-grade study of the friction of audit and GRC work, as practitioners actually live it, never the quality of anyone’s work — and it publishes what the field learns.
Three hunches, from three conversations.
The Controls Testing Velocity Hunch
In data-heavy audit organizations, controls-testing speed is the AI-native era’s biggest win — and probably only there. It drove the full-population testing engine.
The Evidence Friction Hunch
Evidence-curation friction — the chase rounds, wrong deliveries, partial observation windows — is a leading indicator of engagement risk and realization bleed. It drove the Assurance Desk. This is the program’s falsifiable spine.
The IT↔FR Interfacing Hunch
The translation layer between IT audit and financial-reporting audit carries enough friction that some practitioners avoid the work entirely. If it holds, it implies a whole class of instrumentation and tooling that doesn’t exist today.
Each came from a conversation with an operator, and none is a fact we get to assume — each is a hypothesis the instruments exist to test. Conversations like these, turned into surveys, build out the universe the research needs. Yours may be the fourth.
Every feature is an instrument.
The tools we've already built are the first instruments. The Assurance Desk's deterministic signals — what was checked, covered, and reconciled on every engagement — instrument the Evidence Friction Hunch as a byproduct of real work. Substantive Testing and full-population Controls Testing are the Velocity Hunch's instrument at population scale. And the third hunch names tooling that doesn't exist yet — which is exactly what the research decides.
Today's tools were built to test the first hunches; what gets built next follows what the field's measurements actually show. The measurements belong to the field, not to a roadmap.
What the program will never do.
Experience, never quality
AuditEx measures experience and friction — wherever the work binds, from the evidence chase to cross-team handoffs to the documentation conventions review expects. No firm and no auditor is ever graded, scored, or ranked on their work. That is structural, not a policy.
No client evidence, ever
No client evidence enters the research. The instruments observe how the work feels and where it binds — never what any engagement concluded, and never the data underneath it.
Your reality, represented in the data.
See the findings first
Published, anonymized findings go to participating firms before anyone else — the field’s first benchmark of how assurance work actually feels and where it actually binds. Where the reporting floor permits, a firm also gets its own position against the population.
Shape the instruments
Participating firms steer what gets measured, and what gets built off the answers. If a friction matters to your practice and no instrument captures it, that is the next instrument.
Beyond one platform
The instruments are not confined to Luca. Where a firm’s evidence work runs through other workflows, the program builds instruments for those too — a benchmark of one vendor’s users would be product analytics, not field research.
About two hours a quarter.
There is a no-cost research-partner tier with no platform commitment at all: structured surveys and a conversation, about two hours a quarter, for firms that want their reality represented in the data. Firms running Luca participate through the instruments built into the work itself. Findings publish in the State of Audit — the annual report of how assurance work actually feels — with GRC work as its own chapter.
For firms that want to go deeper, design partnership — a small, capped cohort that pilots the tooling and helps operationalize the methodology — starts with a working demo: request one.
Put your firm in the study.
Tell us who you are and where your practice runs. We’ll follow up with the current instruments and the next survey window.