Why "Vibe Compliance" Will Never Be a Thing
The internet has been having a field day with Delve the last week or so. If you missed it: an AI-native accounting startup found itself in hot water when it became clear that their "AI-powered" workflows were generating outputs that auditors are supposed to sign, not skim. The punchline writes itself.
Welcome to the age of Vibe Compliance.
For those unfamiliar with the meme: "Vibe Coding" is the practice of asking an LLM to write software, not really reading it, and shipping it anyway. Fun for weekend projects. Category 5 disaster for audit.
Vibe Compliance is what happens when you trust AI to produce audit-ready evidence, workpapers, or conclusions without structured verification, without human judgment baked into the workflow, and without an unbreakable chain of accountability. That's not a bold product thesis. In audit terms, we'd just call that a deficiency.
I've been thinking about this problem for a while.
Before ChatGPT was a household name, I was at AuditBoard helping build out their integration platform from the ground up. Before that, I was at Workiva building audit and financial reporting infrastructure where the stakes around data integrity are about as high as they get.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about what happens when you get this wrong.. and who signs the opinion when you do.
That context is why, when we started building Tellen, we made one very deliberate call: we are an AI agent platform for audit firms. Not a "GRC platform." Not a generic "AI for finance" tool. A platform built specifically for accounting firms doing audit, with all the rigor, traceability, and professional standards that entails.
What that actually means in practice.
AI models (and there are a lot of great ones) are genuinely remarkable at extracting meaning from messy client-provided documents, synthesizing findings across control populations, and identifying gaps in evidence packages. We use them. We think carefully about which ones are right for which tasks.
But the model is never the point. The point is what you build around it.
Structured data agents that don't produce freeform summaries. They populate typed schemas tied directly to your engagement framework. Every field has provenance. Every extraction traces back to source evidence. Every fact builds up to one cohesive knowledge graph tied together through hundreds of workpapers, templates, and evidence files.
A workflow engine that models the actual lifecycle of an audit engagement: who reviewed what, when, under what criteria, and what conclusion they reached. Not a chat thread about a workpaper, how to make Chicken Tikka, and what movies are playing this weekend. An actual workflow, with states, transitions, sign-offs, and an audit trail that stands up to PCAOB and AICPA scrutiny.
A data model built on the assumption that a conclusion isn't a conclusion until a licensed professional qualified to make that judgment says it is. AI accelerates the work. It doesn't replace the judgment, and it never will.
This is the thing Vibe Compliance gets exactly backwards. The value of AI in external audit isn't "AI does the audit." AI handles the tedious work, clearly, traceably, and with the auditor in the loop at every step. Nothing is left to vibes.
Your data never leaves your walled garden.
Here's what nobody in the "AI for accounting" space wants to talk about: where does the client data actually go?
Accounting firms hold some of the most sensitive financial information in the world. Client records, unpublished financials, control documentation. Routing that through a third-party SaaS platform and hoping for the best isn't a security posture. It's a client relationship waiting to be ended. And apparently, a vendor relationship too. Sorry Delve, we love what you guys are building!
Tellen deploys into your firm's cloud environment, whether that's Azure, AWS, or GCP. Your agents run in your infrastructure. Your client data stays yours. We never train on it, we never touch it outside your walls, and when you want it out, it's already structured and waiting. We show up where your teams work, fit around your existing workflows, and get out of the way. Full stop.
Bringing your team along for the ride.
There's another dimension to this that doesn't get talked about enough: user experience. I think that's where Delve could take some notes from Tellen.
Audit software has a reputation for being painful to use. That's not a coincidence. It reflects a real assumption that auditors will endure whatever interface they're given because the engagement deadline doesn't move.
We think that's wrong, and we think it costs firms real money. When your staff hates the tool, they do the minimum. When your seniors are fighting the interface, they miss things. When your partners can't get a clean read on engagement status without a 45-minute debrief, decisions get made on vibes.
(See what I did there.)
The AI moment in audit isn't just about automating attribute testing or evidence collection. It's about making the entire experience, for staff, seniors, managers, and partners, coherent and trustworthy enough that people actually want to use it.
That's what we've been building. Not because it's a nice-to-have, but because in audit, adoption is the product.
One more thing.
We do have a Claude plugin.
For those moments when you just want to ask a question, think out loud, or yes, vibe a little. We get it. Sometimes you just need a great AI assistant in your corner.
The difference is knowing when you're vibing and when you're producing a work product someone is going to rely on. That line matters in external audit. We help firms walk it every day.
The bottom line.
The firms and platforms that get this right: structured, traceable, human-in-the-loop by design, deployed where your data already lives, are going to win. The ones that shipped Vibe Compliance and hoped nobody would notice are already finding out what happens next.
External audit is the hardest workflow in professional services. Solve it right, and the rest of accounting is within reach. So watch out. We're coming.
Paul Gerlich is the co-founder and CTO of Tellen. He previously helped build the AuditBoard platform and Workiva's audit and financial reporting infrastructure. He holds a Master's in Data Science (AI/ML) from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.