Rachel Kirkham — AI for Audit: Full-Population Analytics, Risk Scoring & Trust

Rachel Kirkham is the CTO at Mindbridge, where she leads product strategy, data science initiatives, and the company's approach to risk scoring for financial analysis. Before joining Mindbridge, she worked in the public sector as Head of Data Analytics Research at the UK National Audit Office, building out modern analytics capabilities used in financial audits. She's also an ACA-qualified chartered accountant, which gives her a practical view of what auditors need day to day, and she brings a strong community mindset to her work as a founding member of R-Ladies Global and a longtime advocate for diversity in STEM.

In this episode, Rachel walks through how her role has evolved at Mindbridge as the tools have matured—from early data science research to shaping products that fit real audit workflows, and now into a new phase where AI agents can sit on top of deep analytics to help people investigate risk faster. She's clear-eyed about what AI can and can't do: it's valuable when it improves quality, coverage, and efficiency, but it also has to meet the same standards as any other software, especially when models can be confidently wrong.