Ask most risk and audit teams where they lose time and the answer usually isn’t fieldwork, testing or analysis. It’s everything around it.
Creating audit files. Rolling work forward. Connecting risks and controls. Chasing follow-ups. Protecting sensitive information. Moving outputs between tools so teams can keep working.
The work around the work can quickly become a job in itself.
These features reduce that burden, helping teams spend less time setting up the process and more time moving risk and audit work forward with the evidence, visibility and control they need.
Risk Maestro helps audit teams reduce the manual work that sits between planning and execution. Available through the Diligent One Platform Task Manager tile, Risk Maestro uses natural language prompts to help teams create audit files, roll forward prior-year audits, draft objectives and connect relevant risks and controls. Instead of manually building that structure from scratch, auditors can review proposed updates and approve changes before anything is written back into Projects.
Every recommendation is presented for review before execution, helping teams speed up setup while keeping professional judgment and oversight firmly in the process. Once approved, updates are pushed directly into Projects with links back to the changes for transparency and traceability.
With Risk Maestro, teams can:
Risk assessments can take time to build before teams get to the analysis itself. Names, auditable entities, factors and scale all need to be set up before audit teams can focus on what the assessment is telling them.
AI-Assisted Risk Assessments in the Audit App help reduce that setup effort. When users add an audit risk assessment, the Audit Assistant guides them through the process and suggests names, entities, factors and scale using historical audit context and best-practice guidance. Teams can accept, adjust or ignore the suggestions, keeping judgment and control with the user while making the creation process faster and more consistent.
In practice, this means teams can:
Audit work looks different depending on the role. A CAE doesn’t need the same starting point as an auditor. An Audit Manager doesn’t need to dig through the same views as someone focused on QA.
The new Persona-Based Home Dashboard in the Audit App gives each user a more relevant starting point based on their role. The platform can serve tailored home views for personas such as Head of Audit, Audit Manager, Auditor or Audit QA, with widgets, metrics and actions that match the work they need to manage.
The home page also surfaces the six most recent activities across audits, control tests, findings and actions, with links that take users back to where they left off. Overview widgets show audit plan progress, audit status, findings by severity and action tracking, helping users understand what needs attention without navigating across multiple screens.
The outcome for audit teams:
Audit execution can become difficult to manage when planning, fieldwork, findings and reporting sit across different tools, spreadsheets or manual trackers.
Audit Execution in the Audit App brings more of that lifecycle into one place. Teams can scope audits at the control level, select controls to test, define test types, execute fieldwork, manage findings, track progress on Kanban boards and generate reports from a single interface. Findings also flow into Issue Manager for broader visibility, while the shared Object Library keeps controls and processes connected across the platform without duplicate setup.
With Audit Execution, teams can:
For small to mid-sized audit teams especially, this gives teams a connected path from scoping to fieldwork, findings and reporting, with better visibility into how work is progressing.
Risk reporting shouldn’t depend on exporting data, rebuilding dashboards or relying on workaround processes every time leaders need a clearer view.
Risk Manager datasets are now available directly in Activity Center, giving reporting users access to six native datasets: Risk-Centric, Control-Centric, Process-Centric, Objective-Centric, Heatmap Inherent Score and Heatmap Residual Score. These datasets also include Organizational Units and Issues data, refresh automatically every 20 minutes and support row-level security.
For Risk Managers, Risk Owners, Compliance Officers and reporting users, this creates a more direct way to build dashboards from Risk Manager data. Teams can use self-service reporting with permission-aware data, while reducing reliance on Robots, Results or other external reporting workarounds.
The reporting payoff:
Follow-up is essential in risk workflows, but too many generic notifications can quickly become background noise.
Advanced Notifications in Risk Manager help teams target alerts more precisely. Administrators can configure notifications for owner changes, workflow events and attribute changes across risks, controls, processes, objectives, assessments and custom objects. Notifications can trigger when assignments change, workflow stages shift or attribute conditions are met. Recipients can be set by role or user, and notifications can include deep links, custom notes, suppressed system emails and consolidated bulk notifications.
With more targeted notifications, teams can:
Risk and compliance teams need visibility, but they also need control. Not every stakeholder should be able to view or update every part of a workflow at every stage.
Section Permissions in Risk Manager give administrators more granular access control. Teams can configure section-level visibility and edit access by workflow stage and user role, with options for No Access, Read Only or Update Access. Read-only users can no longer edit fields, save changes or trigger workflow transitions that require update rights.
For governance and control, this helps teams:
Analytics teams can also lose time when results need to be exported manually before others can collaborate or continue analysis.
Export ACL Tables to ACL AI Studio helps reduce that handoff. Users with ACL AI Studio Owner or Editor permissions can export ACL tables directly from ACL for Windows into ACL AI Studio. Once exported, the data is available for further analysis, collaboration and AI-assisted workflows.
What this removes from the process:
Individually, these updates solve different problems across risk, audit and analytics. Together, they point to the same outcome: helping teams reduce the manual work that sits between planning, execution, reporting and action.
Risk Maestro helps audit teams move work forward from natural language requests while keeping people in control. AI-Assisted Risk Assessments reduce setup so teams can get to analysis sooner. Persona-based dashboards help users start from what matters. Audit Execution keeps more of the audit lifecycle in one workspace. Activity Center datasets make reporting more direct. Advanced Notifications and Section Permissions help teams improve accountability and control. Exporting ACL tables to ACL AI Studio reduces another manual handoff in the analytics workflow.
For risk and audit teams under pressure to do more with the same resources, that matters.
Because the goal isn’t just to manage more work.
It’s to spend less time assembling the process around the work, and more time delivering the insight, assurance and action the organization needs.
Already a Diligent customer? Speak with your Customer Success Manager to learn which Risk & Audit capabilities are available for your team.
Not yet a customer? Request a demo to see how Diligent helps risk and audit teams reduce setup work, improve visibility and keep execution moving.
