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If you're an internal auditor trying to pick one AI event before the year ends, you have plenty to choose from. There are AI summits, vendor showcases and webinars every week, and most of them will happily take your Tuesday.
The harder part is finding one that was built for the work you do. AI raises two questions for an audit function. One is how to use it in your own engagements, and the other is how to give assurance over the AI the rest of the organization is adopting. An event that only covers one of those sends you back to your desk with half of what you need.
We run an AI conference for internal auditors ourselves, called Frontier IA, so we've spent a lot of time thinking about what belongs on the agenda. We'll walk through what we'd look for in any event, and we'll show you how we built ours.
Many of the big AI conferences are designed for engineers, product teams and executives deciding where to invest. They're good at what they do, and you can learn a lot about where the technology is heading.
What we look for on those agendas, and don't always find, is the auditor's side of the table, such as what has to be in the workpaper when a model helped produce the conclusion, or where the control points sit when an AI agent takes an action on its own.
One vice president of internal audit who attended a Cherry Hill session put it well, telling us that much of the AI content they see is "more tutorial or hypothetical or fear based." That's the gap an audit-specific event should fill. The first thing we'd check on any agenda is whether it treats AI as part of the audit job in both directions.
The first side is using AI inside the audit function, which covers the tools, the testing and the documentation. The second is auditing and governing the AI your organization already runs, including the models you didn't build and the features a vendor switched on without much notice.
Your team may be further along on one side than the other. Our post on the state of AI adoption in internal audit in 2026 goes into where functions stand today.
Frontier IA 2026 is organized around those two sides. It's a full-day virtual conference on Tuesday, December 8, 2026, from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM ET, with two tracks running at the same time. Track A is AI in Internal Audit, and Track B is Auditing and Governing AI. You can move between them session by session, so a team can split up and cover both.
Covering both sides is a good start, but the format of the sessions matters just as much.
A keynote can change how you think about AI. It usually can't show you what to type, what to test, or what to save in the file.
For that you need sessions where you work through real audit tasks. On Track A at Frontier IA, the AI Deep-Dive Lab is a two-hour hands-on block on prompt patterns for common audit tasks, on testing and validating AI-assisted procedures, and on recognizing when AI output shouldn't be relied on.
The rest of the track follows the same practical line. From Pilot to Practice covers moving AI from one-off experiments to repeatable practice. Full-Population Testing looks at analytics that let you test the whole population instead of a sample. Workpapers in the AI Era covers the evidence you need to keep when AI helped produce the conclusion.
That last topic is closer to home than it sounds, because quality reviewers are already asking how AI-assisted work was documented. We wrote about a related problem in the vanishing audit trail.
Learning to use AI well doesn't prepare you to audit it. Assurance over a model calls for a different set of questions, and your board may well be asking them already.
Track B at Frontier IA is given over to that work. Inside the Black Box covers model risk frameworks, bias and explainability testing, and third-party AI. When the Agent Acts Alone looks at agentic AI, the kind that takes action without waiting for a human, and at what an audit trail has to capture when it does. If agentic AI is new to you, the explainer on how agentic AI works for risk and audit teams is a helpful primer before the session.
The track finishes with Governance Your Board Trusts, on building an AI oversight layer and on internal audit's role in giving assurance over it. If you already have a board meeting on the calendar, the AI governance questions every board should ask management are worth reading alongside it.
There's one more session on Track B, and it's the two-hour ethics block.
Ethics CPE doesn't have to mean revisiting older case studies, because AI has handed the profession a fresh set of ethical questions. You may already be asking who is accountable when an automated decision goes wrong, or how professional skepticism applies to output a model generated.
Ethics in the Age of Algorithms, the 2026 edition, runs from 10:00 AM to noon ET at Frontier IA and carries 2 hours of ethics CPE. It's built around accountability for automated decisions, bias, transparency, and where professional judgment still has to sit.
A deputy chief risk officer who took our AI ethics course called it the "best ethics course I've attended in the past 20+ years," and we were very glad to hear it. If you'd like a preview, the earlier session is in our on-demand library as Ethics in the Age of Algorithms: What Internal Auditors Must Know.
Cost shapes who gets to learn. When a conference charges four figures a seat, it's hard to send more than one or two people.
Frontier IA is free, and that covers registration, every session and the CPE certificates. You can earn up to 7 NASBA CPE credits across the day, awarded session by session. When you register you'll see an optional donation to the Internal Audit Foundation. It supports the Foundation's research on AI, and Cherry Hill Advisory keeps none of it.
Say you manage a team of five. Your IT auditor could spend the afternoon on Track B with the model risk and agentic AI sessions, while your two newest staff take the hands-on lab on Track A. You could join the opening session, Focus 2027, for where the function needs to be by next year, and bring everyone back together for the hour with the panel of chief audit executives. With that plan your team covers both tracks in one day, and there's no registration fee to get approved.
Anyone who stays for the full day also earns the Frontier IA Certificate in AI for Internal Audit and a digital badge.
Frontier IA isn't the only place to learn this, and we'd encourage you to look around. The IIA's GAM conference in March 2027 has AI assurance on its program and is a strong choice if you lead a function and want in-person time with other audit leaders. We compared the options in our guide to the best internal audit conferences.
If you need practical AI skills, a way to audit AI and your ethics hours before December 31, and you'd like to bring your team without paying a registration fee, Frontier IA was built for that. The ethics hours come from the ethics session on Track B. You can register for Frontier IA for free today.
And if your function needs hands-on help with AI governance before then, reach out to Cherry Hill Advisory and we'll be glad to talk it through.
We hope to see you on December 8.
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