Seekr and Stephano Slack have announced a strategic collaboration to bring artificial intelligence (AI) into financial auditing and advisory workflows, dramatically speeding up processes and improving accuracy for firms across the middle market.
Seekr, a provider of secure and explainable AI solutions, and Stephano Slack LLC, a U.S. regional leader in accounting and financial services, are teaming up to deploy AI agents across core audit and advisory tasks, beginning with 401(k) plan auditing and complex financial data extraction.
This initiative aims to automate labor-intensive work and cut auditing time dramatically. As the firms claim, the joint solution is reducing manual extraction and reconciliation from roughly 50 hours to just 2 hours in many cases, while maintaining high accuracy, regulatory compliance, and governance.
The significance of this collaboration reflects a broader industry shift toward using AI in financial services. Today, many major accounting firms and financial professionals are adopting AI to handle repetitive, data-heavy tasks like invoice validation, contract analysis, and report generation, allowing human auditors to focus on judgment-based areas of risk and strategy. AI agents are also being integrated into next-generation audit processes to analyze more complete datasets and accelerate workflows without compromising audit quality.
In the U.S., which is Stephano Slack‘s target market, the 401(k) audit plays a vital role in protecting household retirement savings under ERISA regulations. With trillions of dollars held in defined contribution plans, ensuring timely and accurate audits at scale is essential to investor confidence and financial integrity. Seekr’s AI agents serve this goal as they accelerate data ingestion, validation, and Excel-based workpaper population, allowing auditors to extend sampling beyond minimum regulatory thresholds, enhancing both audit coverage and assurance.
Executives from both firms framed the partnership as an important step toward modernizing financial services. Seekr’s leadership noted that the collaboration expands how advisory firms can scale secure, accurate AI tools across audit and assurance services. Meanwhile, Stephano Slack highlighted the opportunity to enhance client service and compliance by responsibly applying advanced AI aligned with professional standards.
Beyond efficiency gains, the move underscores why AI adoption matters in financial auditing and advisory work: traditional audit processes are often time-consuming, resource-intensive, and prone to human error. By automating foundational tasks, firms can shorten engagement cycles, reduce operational cost, improve audit trails, and focus talent on higher-value analysis and strategic advisory roles. This not only boosts client outcomes but positions firms to compete more effectively as technology reshapes the financial services landscape.
The Seekr – Stephano Slack partnership illustrates how targeted AI deployment can deliver immediate return on investment today while laying the groundwork for broader adoption of AI-powered assurance, compliance, and analytics tools across the middle market.
