Answers
What does an auditor need from an agent workforce?
The answer
A record that reconstructs a decision without relying on anyone’s memory: what the agent saw, what it did, which policy allowed it, who owned that policy, and when. Append-only, timestamped, and complete enough that the reviewer never has to ask a person what happened.
The distinction that matters is between logging and audit. A log says an action occurred. An audit record says why it was permitted — and that second clause is the one a diligence room, a regulator or an insurer will ask for. An organization with millions of log lines and no policy attribution has a data problem rather than an audit trail, and will discover this at the worst possible moment.
Five properties make a record defensible. It is append-only, so history cannot be tidied. It attributes to a specific agent identity rather than a shared service account. It names the policy and the human owner of that policy. It captures the inputs the decision was made on, not merely the output. And it is retained on the same schedule as the firm’s other books and records, because an agent’s actions are the firm’s actions. Building this after an incident is considerably more expensive than building it first.