What if controls testing could be done in a fraction of the time—without compromising audit rigor?

Controls testing today remains one of the more manual and time-intensive components of Internal Audit and SOX programs. Evidence review can consume significant effort, documentation inconsistencies create review risk, and testing logic often needs to be rebuilt each cycle, limiting scalability and increasing the risk that approaches may not stand up to regulatory scrutiny. A major blocker continues to be the heavy reliance on Excel-based evidence—often unstructured, inconsistent, and difficult to interpret at scale.

PwC’s Dynamic Testing solution helps address these challenges by introducing an agentic workflow aligned to audit methodology. Testing logic can be generated using prior-year workpapers or design assessment outputs, while supporting evidence is ingested and analyzed across real-world file formats. This includes complex Excel files (even with embedded images and formulas), word documents, PDFs, and other unstructured sources, enhanced by PwC’s Excel frontier agent to enable next-level evidence analysis and annotation.

Sample-based testing is then executed with AI-generated annotations that link outputs directly to underlying evidence. AI-driven insights can provide a clear audit trail, explaining the “why” behind each extraction and annotation, helping strengthen defensibility and reviewer confidence.

What’s different about PwC’s solution

Many of today’s tools automate fragments of testing, but Dynamic Testing differentiates by orchestrating the entire controls testing lifecycle within a governed, agentic workflow, combining deep evidence understanding (including complex Excel), transparent AI reasoning, and real-time auditor interaction in a way point solutions and traditional automation can’t replicate.

Built-in review checkpoints enable users to assess and refine AI-generated testing logic before execution, ensuring professional judgment remains central to each outcome and reinforcing control and auditability from the outset. An embedded AI assistant further helps enhance the experience by enabling auditors to ask questions about the testing logic and testing outputs in real time.

Testing turnarounds shrink from weeks to days, and outputs export directly into client or external auditor templates.

The solution is also a part of PwC's Internal Audit Orchestration Suite, a broader set of AI-enabled capabilities designed to help modernize and orchestrate the end-to-end internal audit lifecycle.

The impact is measurable

Reduced manual effort

Automated test procedure generation, evidence parsing, and annotation generation can significantly compress controls testing timelines, reducing effort by 30–40%.

Scalable, consistent testing logic

Standardized testing is applied across large sample sets while preserving flexibility.

Defensible, audit-ready outputs

AI reasoning is documented at the test-procedure level and exported into existing auditor or client templates, ready for regulatory review

Human oversight at each stage

Users review and edit AI-generated test instructions before execution, with version control enabling full auditability.

As regulatory expectations continue to evolve and audit timelines become more compressed, the ability to move faster while maintaining rigor is critical. PwC’s Dynamic Testing solution enables organizations to modernize controls testing through a structured, agentic workflow, helping bring speed and defensibility to a process long constrained by manual effort.