My personal prediction is that audit in its current form will cease to exist within the next 10 years. Already at Big Four firms, there is a shift towards risk

My personal prediction is that audit in its current form will cease to exist within the next 10 years. Already at Big Four firms, there is a shift towards risk management, especially when more and more clients are adopting technology to manage all of their financials. What used to take many hours/days for auditors to manually reconcile and "audit", now can be automated using technology and instead, the focus will be on assessing risk and controls that are in place in those technology solutions. This is evident by current downward trend of audit revenue (even in Big Four) and an increase in revenue coming from Risk Advisory service lines instead.