Scaled by people, regulated by default.
Every engagement re-teaches the procedure, and practitioners who could build tools have no governed place to build them. One approved platform lets the firm build once and reuse.
Industries · Professional Services & Audit
Run audit, tax, and advisory workflows in your own tenant
The platform under your firm's tooling, with attribution and reversibility built in, deployed air-gapped in your Azure with zero egress.
Thousands of users. Multiple countries. Air-gapped. Over a year in production.
Runs in your tenantAir-gapped optionVersion-controlled methodologyEvery tested item cited
What customers say
“Use the Athena platform probably closer to the concept and how it was designed, like, with the spaces architecture where you've got a set of primitives and capabilities, and you bring together the right set of capabilities to solve a task.”
“Digital worker, it gets spun up, it gets given access to the toolkits that it needs. It gets given access to the data that it needs. Just exists for the period it needs to exist to perform the task. And then it gets torn back down again afterwards.”
“I like that direction, that concept of the agent is the agent. It becomes an entity in its own right with its own ownership and its own missioning, and you get rid of the gray area and the blurry lines.”
“The performance, say, the kind of speed and latency on those APIs for creating assets, was better in [our private cloud] than it was in managed cloud.”
“It's good to understand the capability of the platform. That how far, and how quickly you guys can get these things going [...] that has been impressive overall.”
“Lets us get a lot more out of our data than [...] We can sit on top of all of the data in [our data warehouse] as opposed to just, like, our little ingested, you know, three gigabytes semantic models. I think we have a lot of power here.”
“Gave Athena the spreadsheet, explained which column I was trying to figure out, and then ten secs it told me... exactly how the calculation was based on the other data.”
“He wrote the entire stuff. By itself. And I was there, and I was thinking, alright. If I had to write all this stuff, I mean, I would've spent days, days, days.”
“I send that to the programmer and he said, alright. I read your file. I copied the section of the code because he has the right interface, and it works. Wow. Just like magic.”
“One workspace. All different, let's say, avatars of their output data. Right? Suddenly, it's dashboard. Excel is here. PowerPoint is when it's all together. It's very impressive.”
Verbatim from customer calls. Customers anonymized.
Challenges
What Professional Services & Audit has to get right
Methodology stays with the firm.
Standards and procedures belong to the firm. The platform runs them with attribution and reversibility, and procedures live as skills in a version-controlled library.
Every document needs a lineage.
Reviewers need the version they saw, risk teams need monitoring, and engagements need deletion when they end. Governance has to be built in.
Use cases by team
What a Global Professional Services Firm Runs on Athena
AssuranceSubstantive testing at scale, with every tested item cited to the client document.
Substantive testing
Client documents ingested, the sample fanned out with one sub-agent per item, results aggregated, and the work paper written with a citation for every tested item.
Client document intake
A client portal with uploads against a checklist, read receipts, and reviewer decisions; an agent flags what is missing and drafts follow-ups.
Client data to answers
Client extracts loaded, a semantic model drafted, and a guided application built so practitioners can explore and drill into the work paper.
Continuous risk monitoring
Risk scans that propose plan changes for approval, with every document kept at the version a reviewer saw.
TaxTax procedures as reusable skills and workflows.
Tax procedures as workflows
Procedures captured as skills in a version-controlled library; the practitioners who build create guided applications for everyone else.
Standard packages across offices
Agents, workflows, and applications packaged once and deployed from Git across workspaces.
AdvisoryAdvisory teams build their own AI-enabled services.
Client-facing agent catalog
Agents built for internal work packaged with client-facing descriptions and offered to advisory clients.
Client analytics applications
Workshop-ready applications on client data that can be reused for the next engagement.
Firm operations & riskGovernance, retention, and security controls the firm can evidence.
Engagement retention and deletion
Retention follows engagement policy, including hard delete when an engagement ends.
Usage and trace review
Usage and agent traces summarized for risk and quality teams, instead of manual sampling.
Customer story
From client documents to a completed audit procedure
- Before
A substantive test over hundreds of samples. Each one opened, tested, documented by hand. An auditor spends days on procedures that follow the same steps every time: match the invoice to the shipping document, check the amount against the contract, confirm payment terms.
- What we did
Ingest the prepared-by-client (PBC) documents. Fan the sample out: one sub-agent per item, 125 running at once. Aggregate results to a database. Write the work paper with a citation into the client document for every tested item. The procedure runs inside the firm's own cloud with zero egress, air-gapped, with data residency per region.
- After
The procedure completes in a fraction of the time with a full trail. A global professional services firm runs this air-gapped in its own tenant, over a year in production, thousands of users. Every tested item cited. Every step logged. A human reviews exceptions; the rest is confirmed.
What to plan for
Methodology stays with the firm. Athena runs the procedure; it does not write the standard. The first run exposes every ambiguity in the written procedure. That is expected, and it improves the procedure. Air-gapped updates ship on your change window, not the continuous cloud release schedule.
Example workflow
PBC intake and the client portal
Integrations
The systems Professional Services & Audit already runs
Athena connects what the engagement team already uses and runs the procedures the firm already owns, in the firm's own tenant.
Client collaboration
PortalTeamsSlackEmailSharePoint
Engagement data
WordExcelPowerPointFiles and PDFsDatabase
Firm infrastructure
Cloud tenantGitIdentity provider
Delivery
Work papersDashboardsApplications
Security and compliance
What your security review will ask
Set the boundaries before the first run. Private cloud in the firm's tenant. Zero-egress observability. Red-team-hardened roles. Restrictive computer mode. Data residency per region.
Air-gapped deployment
Private cloud in the firm's own cloud with zero egress. Feature parity to managed cloud. Updates ship on your change window, not the roughly four-minute staging cadence.
Data residency per region
Data residency per region: a global professional services firm runs users in multiple countries and regions. Each region's data stays in that region. No cross-border egress.
JIT, double-logged vendor access
Just-in-time, time-bounded vendor access requested per incident, approved by the customer, expiring automatically, logged twice: once by the platform, once by the cluster.
Version-controlled methodology
Procedures as Skills in a version-controlled library, synced to Git, pulled by every engagement workspace. Publishing to the shared library can be gated to admins.
Work-product lineage
Time travel to the version a reviewer saw. Every save stamped with the author, human or agent, plus the session and message that caused it. End-of-engagement hard delete twice a year.
SOC 2 Type II · HIPAA · Zero data retention
SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, zero data retention with every model provider. Clients use portals, included in Athena services. Usage and trace intelligence instead of a human trace analyst.
For every stakeholder
Answers for everyone who signs off
Can we deploy this in our own tenant so the risk committee will approve it?
Yes. Athena runs in your cloud tenant or fully air-gapped, with the same features as the managed cloud.
How is vendor access and telemetry handled?
Telemetry can stay inside your tenant. Vendor access is just-in-time, approved by you, time-bounded, and logged.
How do we roll procedures out across offices?
Package skills, workflows, and applications once and deploy them from Git to every engagement workspace.
How do clients take part?
Clients use portals with guest access, included in Athena services.
FAQ
What can AI agents do for an audit, tax, or advisory firm?
They run the repeatable parts of engagements: document intake, testing, work paper drafting, tax procedures, and client reporting, with a full trail on every step.
Does our methodology stay ours?
Yes. The firm defines the procedures; agents follow them. Procedures are kept in a version-controlled library the firm owns.
Can this pass our risk and independence reviews?
Athena can run in the firm's own cloud tenant or fully air-gapped, with every action attributed and every document kept at the version a reviewer saw.
How do we roll this out across offices?
Build a procedure once, then deploy it to every office from one library, with no manual setup per office.
Where should we start?
With one procedure on one engagement, run end to end in a sandbox, with every tested item cited to its source.
One platform underneath
AGS · Athena Governance System
Records every change by a person or an agent, rolls back one contributor's edits without losing anyone else's, and keeps the model, instructions, and sources behind each agent action.
Palladium · deployment
How the platform is deployed: Athena's managed cloud, your cloud on AWS, GCP, or Azure, on-prem, air-gapped, or GovCloud. Same platform in every option.
How it fits together
Build, Work, and Data on top; 150+ connectors and every surface in and out; one map of the whole platform.
Related
Athena Library
Run this on a schedule
Ready-made audit briefs you can run on a schedule.
- AI agent starters for audit and assurance10 ready-made starters, 4 that run on a schedule.
- Client risk monitorGoing-concern, litigation, and leadership signals per client.
- Accounting standards updateNew standards and guidance, effective dates, and actions.
- Engagement status updateProgress by area, open requests, and decisions needed.
Bring one engagement's document request list.
We will run one procedure end to end in a sandbox and show every tested item cited to its source.
Runs in your tenantAir-gapped optionVersion-controlled methodologyEvery tested item cited