Internal Audit Trends for 2025: Increasing Demands for Strategic Alignment, Skills, and Assurance

Current trends in internal audit point to an overarching truth: Internal auditors must evolve to improve how they help their organizations identify, understand, and manage critical risks. These trends embed challenges that are simultaneously opportunities to increase internal audit’s value and impact. Fortunately, new technology innovations can help teams answer the increasing demands for strategic alignment, new skills, and expanded assurance that are trending for 2025.  

Trend 1: New IIA Standards Require More Strategic Alignment

The Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) updated its Global Internal Audit Standards (Standards) in 2024. While the Standards raise the bar in many areas, most notable is the increased focus on enabling internal audit to provide more strategic value to the business. In particular, CAEs are required to develop and implement an internal audit strategy (9.2), resource strategy (8.2), technology strategy (10.3), and plan for leveraging others’ assurance work (9.1, 9.5).

Internal auditors want to be perceived as strategic advisors, and the new Standards are a purposeful invitation to take on more strategic roles. However, many internal auditors are struggling to prioritize conformance alongside existing workloads. In addition, many report that stakeholders don’t readily perceive their role as strategic. Half of respondents in the Internal Audit Foundation’s (IAF’s) Vision 2035 survey said that “being misunderstood or undervalued” represents the greatest challenge to the profession.

How Tech Can Help

• Entity-risk-based audit planning capabilities enable effective surfacing and targeting of audit entities’ riskiest areas. By associating specific risks and entities, teams assess entity-risk combinations rather than audit entities, helping them be more strategic in deciding which risks to cover, when, and to what extent.
• IIA Standards self-assessments help teams assess current conformance, drive conformance efforts, and enable successful transformation initiatives via streamlined self-assessments, gap identification, and action plan documentation.  

Trend 2: New Technologies and Risks Demand New Skills

The fast-expanding risk landscape requires internal audit teams to develop or source new skills in critical areas such as cybersecurity, AI, data privacy, advanced technology adoption, sustainability, and others. Vision 2035 identified expanding internal audit’s skills as a key challenge and opportunity: 42% of respondents reported lacking needed skill sets within their teams. Unfortunately, ongoing resource constraints and talent shortages mean it’s not reasonable for most teams to develop or acquire all needed skills in-house. Additionally, stakeholder support is often lacking when internal audit’s value isn’t readily perceived. 

To gain the needed support, CAEs must explore strategies for fostering trust, driving visibility and engagement, and creating efficiencies that free up bandwidth. They may consider relying on control owners and stakeholders to take on more of the burden, co-sourcing with external providers, sharing resources with other audit, risk, and compliance teams in the organization, and leveraging technology to drive engagement, visibility, and impact.

How Tech Can Help

• Skills/qualifications tracking tools support intelligent staffing decisions, compliance (e.g., Standards, QARs), identification of gaps and trends, development planning, and more strategic conversations with boards/executives about budget and hiring needs.
• Resource planning capabilities enable staffing plans based on real-time resource availability, reducing the administrative burden while providing visibility into utilization.
• Control owner self-assessments (CSAs) promote effective partnering with stakeholders to increase assurance coverage and improve prioritization. CSAs assign control owners questionnaires for assessing controls, helping teams determine reliance thresholds and assess where deeper audits are needed. 

Trend 3: More Risk Assurance Needed From Limited Resources

As internal auditors struggle to address the constantly expanding risk landscape, they are also being asked to do more risk assurance work. A 2024 AuditBoard survey found that 55% of CFOs and 50% of audit committees and boards are asking internal audit to do more work around risk — but that the bulk of internal audit’s capacity continues to be tied up in traditional audit and SOX work. 

Rising stakeholder expectations offer internal auditors a vital opportunity to increase their strategic impact. Unfortunately, risks and workloads are growing just as most budgets and headcounts are flat or shrinking. Labor-intensive manual processes and disjointed legacy technologies further increase the burden. The core problem: the need to do more with less, maximizing impact and efficiency simultaneously. 

How Tech Can Help

• Audit analytics and integrations enable efficiencies and faster decision-making while supporting more thorough testing and coverage. Out-of-the-box workflows support common audit and SOX tasks and testing activities, and users can build custom analytic workflows that also seamlessly integrate with source applications (eg Workday, NetSuite, Snowflake) to further increase efficiency. 
• AI-powered recommendations save time by generating first drafts of issue descriptions.
• Integrated tickmarking, referencing, and markup capabilities streamline workpaper compilation and markup, enabling testers to interact directly with documents and testing attributes to automate testing results. 
• Enhanced SOX tester experiences offer configurable workflows that track each testing phase step, integrate collection of populations/samples, and support multiple reviews.

Innovating Internal Audit Solutions for 2025 and Beyond

AuditBoard is purpose-built to help internal auditors transform challenges into strategic advantages. Every solution we build is designed around the use cases, workflows, pain points, and priorities of the teams we serve. Learn more about how AuditBoard’s industry-leading internal audit software can help you turn 2025’s trends into opportunities to increase impact.

Want to see AuditBoard in action? Register for our monthly Live Demo Webinar to learn how AI-powered GRC technology can help your team streamline IIA Standards conformance, optimize resource efficiency and experience, get real-time visibility into your audit activities, and more!