Ep. 291: Pioneering in the AI Front w/ Martin Preedy (Reddit)

This week on The Audit Podcast, Martin, Head of Internal Audit at Reddit, joins the show to discuss why the opportunity for internal audit is bigger now than ever and how auditors can move from backseat drivers to helpful copilots.   Martin shares how he learned Reddit's complex digital advertising business by being a humble "sponge". He explains his unique hiring strategy—hiring for a "major" in deep technical craft (like data science or engineering) and teaching the "minor" of audit later. He also breaks down his approach to navigating tough risk conversations and reveals how his team uses generative AI to automate 70% of their recurring SOX testing.   02:32 How Martin Uses AI in His Personal Life 03:45 The One Thing Every Auditor Should Do 06:06 How to Learn a New Business Quickly 07:30 Why Internal Audit Has Its Biggest Opportunity Yet 10:13 Rethinking Audit Hiring: Specialists Over Traditional Auditors 14:12 Teaching Audit Skills to Technical Experts 16:12 How to Have Tough Conversations About Risk 18:04 AI Use Cases Inside Reddit's Internal Audit Team 21:24 Final Thoughts   Be sure to connect with Martin on LinkedIn.   Also, be sure to follow us on our social media accounts on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.   Also be sure to sign up for The Audit Podcast newsletter and to check the full video interview on The Audit Podcast YouTube channel.   This podcast is brought to you by Greenskies Analytics, the services firm that helps auditors leap-frog up the analytics maturity model. Their approach for launching audit analytics programs with a series of proven quick-win analytics will guarantee the results worthy of the analytics hype.    Whether your audit team needs a data strategy, methodology, governance, literacy, or anything else related to audit and analytics, schedule.