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If you're checking your remaining CPE hours this month and planning next year's conferences at the same time, you have a lot of events to choose from. Some of them want two and a half days and a flight to Las Vegas, and others want a Tuesday at your desk.
If you're deciding where your training days and your training budget should go, it may surprise you that there isn't one best internal audit conference. There's the one that fits what you need this year, and that changes depending on whether you're short on ethics hours, getting your team comfortable with AI, or looking for a room full of people who do your job.
We should say up front that we run one of the events on this list. Frontier IA is our conference, so read that section knowing where we sit, and we'll tell you where the other events are the better choice.
Most of us go to conferences for some mix of CPE, skills we can use on the next engagement, time with peers, and a couple of days away from the inbox. It helps to decide which of those matters most before you open a single agenda.
Timing changes the answer. An active, practicing Certified Internal Auditor generally has 40 CPE hours to report by December 31 each year, so in the fourth quarter the hours themselves tend to win. In the spring, with a full year ahead, a leadership event with long hallway conversations can be worth far more than the credits printed on the certificate.
Budget matters as well, and the registration fee is only part of it. An in-person conference also costs flights, hotel nights and the days your team covers for you, while a virtual event saves you the travel even when it still charges a registration fee.
With that in mind, these are the events we'd look at over the next twelve months, starting with the one that's closest.
Frontier IA 2026 is a full-day virtual conference on AI and internal audit. It takes place on Tuesday, December 8, 2026, from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM ET, and it's free to attend, including every session and your CPE certificates.
You can earn up to 7 NASBA CPE credits across the day, including 2 ethics hours if you join the ethics session on Track B, which is useful timing if your ethics hours are still open in December. Two tracks run side by side. One covers putting AI to work inside the audit function, and the other covers auditing and governing AI. You can move between them session by session. CPE is awarded per session, so you can build your own path through the day.
The day opens with Focus 2027, a general session on where internal audit stands with AI today and what 2027 will ask of the function. Later in the day there's a full hour with a panel of chief audit executives. If you stay for the whole day, you leave with the Frontier IA Certificate in AI for Internal Audit and a digital badge you can add to LinkedIn.
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.
Frontier IA is a good choice if you want a lot of practical AI content and year-end CPE without spending any budget. A virtual day won't give you three days in a room with your peers, though, and for that you'd look to the spring.
The IIA's GAM: Great Audit Minds conference runs March 22 to 24, 2027, at Fontainebleau Las Vegas. It's in person only, it runs two and a half days, and it carries more than 15 CPE hours.
GAM is built for chief audit executives, aspiring CAEs and senior audit leaders, and it brings together more than 1,200 leaders from internal audit, risk and governance. The 2027 program centers on AI oversight, geopolitical risk and audit technology, although the session-by-session agenda was still taking shape when we wrote this.
The real draw is the people. Peer exchange has been rated the top reason to attend GAM two years running, and that matches what we hear from the audit leaders we work with. A candid conversation with someone who has already taken an AI governance question to their audit committee is hard to get from a webinar.
The trade-off is cost. The non-member rate is $2,295 before travel and hotel, with lower rates for IIA members and for early registration.
Not every need is big enough for Las Vegas. If you want depth on a single subject, the IIA runs one-day virtual conferences through the year, including the 2027 Fraud Virtual Conference on February 16, 2027, and an Enterprise Risk Management Virtual Conference later in the year.
Both of those are included with IIA membership in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean, so if you're a member they're worth putting on the calendar now.
These days suit a team with a specific item on next year's plan. If you're building a fraud risk assessment in the first quarter, a fraud-focused day in February lines up nicely with the work.
Your local IIA chapter is easy to overlook when the national events have bigger stages. Chapter conferences and training days are usually close to home and priced for local budgets, and the people you meet there are the ones you'll run into again next quarter.
They're also a comfortable place for the newer auditors on your team to ask questions and start building a network without needing a travel approval.
Chapters and universities can co-sponsor Frontier IA as well, which lets them bring their members and students to the day at no cost to the chapter or the school. If you plan programs for a chapter or teach audit, you can email cpe@cherryhilladvisory.com and we'll get you set up.
A co-sponsor or a familiar chapter name can get an event onto your shortlist, but neither one tells you whether the sessions will be worth your day.
Session titles are easy to write. "AI and the Future of Internal Audit" could be a masterclass, or it could be forty minutes of slides you've already seen.
A better test is whether each session says what you'll be able to do when it ends. Sessions that carry NASBA CPE publish learning objectives and a program level, so it's worth reading them. An objective like "prepare workpaper documentation that evidences AI-assisted work" is something you can take back to your team, while "understand the AI landscape" is harder to use on Monday morning.
It's also worth looking at who is teaching. People who have run an audit function, or who do this work every week, tend to bring the examples you came for. One vice president of internal audit who attended an earlier Cherry Hill session told us that much of the AI content they see is "more tutorial or hypothetical or fear based," and that's a fair description of what to avoid.
Then check the level against how much each person already knows about the topic. A senior manager who's new to AI can get a lot from a basic session, while a second-year auditor in an intermediate lab may spend the hour catching up.
Say you lead a team of six and your training budget covers one in-person registration. You could have the whole team join Frontier IA on December 8, 2026, for the AI sessions and the CPE, and go to GAM yourself in March 2027 for the peer conversations. There's no registration fee for the team's day, and it gives everyone a shared starting point for the AI work going into your risk-based internal audit plan for 2027.
If your plan has a heavy fraud or risk management component, you can add the matching IIA virtual day. If you have newer staff, the chapter conference is an easy addition.
A mix like that gives you CPE, practical skills and time with peers across the year, and it saves the travel budget for the one event where being in the room matters.
If AI is on your plan for next year, our look at the state of AI adoption in internal audit in 2026 is a good next read.
You can register for Frontier IA for free today. And if you'd like a hand getting your function ready for AI work 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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