The Beginning of the End?

Unless you live under a rock, the spectre of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Industry 4.0 and "Quality 4.0" (whatever that is) will have an impact on the practices we know as auditing.

Indeed, some have postulated that technology will make auditing, as we know it, obsolete.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Should younger auditors be thinking "Armageddon"? As in "Armageddon out of Auditing!"

 

That's a very interesting point! In talking with some colleagues who are SMEs in this stuff, there would be machines which are IIOT connected, so that they learn from variations in product, fed back from automated inspections of key characteristics, in real time. They can learn from various inputs, such as machine temperature to perform closed-loop controls on parameters to keep within the specifications and if not, shut down and alarm.

 

I wonder how AI would manage the onsite observation of conditions in, say a foundry or chemical refinery.

Until that gap is bridged, I do not see us as being replaced though I can certainly anticipate people wanting to replace us.

 

Through the use of sensors, cameras etc. there’s actually very little which cannot be observed by a network of IIOT connected sensors. In many cases, the human work in refineries, foundries and similar, is being replaced by automation, since those environments are not where people want/should work. Hence, cobots/robots etc can do the work.