Founded in 1981 and headquartered in Atlanta, Frazier & Deeter (FD) is a Top 50 accounting and advisory firm offering a full suite of tax, audit, risk and cyber advisory, and digital transformation services. FD's advisory practice specializes in SOC reporting, PCI compliance, HITRUST assessments, and cybersecurity advisory, with every client engagement across these service lines performed end-to-end within Fieldguide.
Kevin Patterson is a Manager in FD's Advisory Practice and a leader in the firm's HITRUST practice, an eight-person team responsible for every HITRUST engagement that comes through the firm. Kevin has been doing HITRUST and SOC work for eight years, and he has used Fieldguide exclusively for approximately four of those years, spanning two different employers. At a previous firm, he lived through the era of SharePoint folders and Excel-based workflows. When he joined FD a year and a half ago, the firm was already running on Fieldguide.
When he was interviewing for his current role, learning that FD ran its advisory practice on Fieldguide was a welcome discovery.
"Let's just say that in my interviews, I was very happy to hear that FD was using Fieldguide," says Kevin. "I lived through the SharePoint, ShareFile, Excel sheet days, and it was a nightmare doing engagements through there. I'm a huge fan of Fieldguide and what they do for our process workflow. I think it's great."
FD's HITRUST practice handles validated assessments for clients across multiple industries. Every HITRUST engagement that comes through the firm is delivered end-to-end through the Fieldguide workflow, and the team has its process dialed in. But even with a mature workflow and a modern platform, the testing phase of each engagement had historically been the most time-intensive and least scalable part of the work, and that set the ceiling on what the team could take on.
HITRUST validated assessments require detailed controls testing across the CSF, with each control domain requiring evidence evaluation against specific requirement statements. The submission workbook that goes to a QA reviewer or directly to HITRUST needs to include precise attributes for every tested control. Kevin's team would work through these domains one by one, testing sequentially, evaluating evidence, documenting findings, and preparing the output for downstream review.
The volume of testing is unavoidable regardless of experience level. When a control domain requires evaluating dozens of evidence artifacts, even seasoned practitioners need hours to work through it methodically. Every hour spent on manual testing was an hour pulled away from client advisory, professional development, or capacity for the next engagement in the queue. And for an eight-person team handling the firm's entire HITRUST book of business, those hours compound quickly across dozens of assessments per year.
Before Fieldguide, the situation was worse. Kevin describes the old process of Excel spreadsheets and SharePoint folders as tedious and slow, a workflow where even basic evidence tracking required manual coordination across disconnected systems.
"The old process was just very manual, tedious. Took forever to do anything," Kevin says. "You guys have streamlined a lot."
Moving to Fieldguide four years ago solved the workflow and collaboration problem. Evidence collection, client communication, and engagement management all moved into a central platform. But the testing itself, the actual evaluation of evidence against HITRUST requirements, remained a manual, sequential process that consumed the bulk of engagement hours.
In late 2025, Kevin's HITRUST team began piloting Field Agents with a deliberate, phased approach. The team started with lookback engagements, previously completed assessments where the team already knew the expected outcomes. This allowed them to validate the Field Agents' accuracy against known results before expanding to live engagement scenarios. Kevin worked closely with the Fieldguide team to configure the output format, iterating on the agent summary until it matched exactly what his team needed for their downstream workflows.
The result was an output that could go directly into the QA review process or the HITRUST submission workbook without reformatting.
"The output for Testing Agent is perfect for us," Kevin says. "It formats everything exactly how we want. It has all the attributes that we need, whether I'm going to hand this submission workbook over to a QA reviewer or directly to HITRUST."
For a HITRUST validated assessment, the submission workbook is the final deliverable. When the agent's output feeds straight into submission, the reclaimed time stays reclaimed. Kevin's team configured the output to match their exact format requirements, so the Field Agent's work product flows directly into the existing quality process rather than adding a step.
FD then configured Agent Triggers, which let Testing Agent begin running as soon as evidence is submitted to the platform. On a lookback engagement, Kevin's team configured the triggers and tested the entire HITRUST CSF at once. Instead of working through control domains sequentially over days, Testing Agent ran across the full assessment simultaneously while the team focused on other work.
The results confirmed what the team expected. The practitioner's role shifted from running each test to reviewing agent output and applying judgment to the results.
The real value of Agent Triggers is parallelism. Testing Agent runs across multiple controls at the same time while the practitioner advances other engagements, handles client communications, or works on entirely separate deliverables. The question shifts from "how fast can I test one control?" to "how much of the project can I cover while doing other work?" With triggers configured, the answer is: “all of it”.
The pilot validated two things for Kevin's team: Field Agents produce work that meets FD's quality bar for HITRUST submissions, and the capacity they return is substantial enough to change how the team operates day to day.
The quality proof point came from the pilot itself. The team validated Field Agents on lookback engagements against known outcomes, and the output met the same bar the team holds for every HITRUST submission. Field Agents don't replace the judgment and process discipline behind that standard. They extend it, giving practitioners more time for the judgment calls that actually determine certification outcomes rather than the manual evidence evaluation that Field Agents can handle.
The numbers behind the shift: across FD's advisory practice, Field Agents are delivering 40% time savings on controls testing and 8% on evidence requests. For the HITRUST practice specifically, that is 71 hours on controls testing and 19 hours on requests, a combined 90 hours returned to an eight-person team that was already running at capacity. Multiply that across a full year of engagements and the capacity returned is measured in weeks, not days.
Kevin is excited to integrate Field Agents into the team's standard process now that the firm has made the decision to implement Field Agents platform-wide.
"Over the course of the pilot, the Testing Agents, whether it's general, sample, or the HITRUST-specific agent, have all worked very well," Kevin says. "They're going to be integrated into our process once we finalize everything."
What matters more to Kevin is where that capacity goes. He sees it flowing toward the professional development and strategic work that engagement deadlines have always squeezed.
"Take people that normally spend five days a week sifting through evidence, for example, we can now shift them to more strategic initiatives," Kevin says. "Professional development goals, getting another certification, whatever that might be. They're increasing their own value plus adding value to the team."
The point is broader than any single certification or initiative. Fieldguide's Agent Workforce creates room for the kind of work that builds careers and builds the firm's expertise, work that has historically been the first thing to get cut when engagement timelines tighten.
"Internal initiatives like this AI pilot, additional skillsets and industry-recognized certifications: those are the things that build credibility," Kevin says. "Having that additional expertise on the team carries weight, especially with clients."
As FD prepares to implement Agents throughout its broader platform, Kevin and his peers in the other service lines are looking toward the future and already making plans to put the newly created capacity to work.
"I imagine we'll see significant acceleration across our advisory teams," Kevin says. "It opens up real capacity for the team, whether that's taking on additional engagements or investing in the kind of strategic work we haven't had room for."
The firm ran parallel pilots across three service lines, SOC, PCI, and HITRUST, with each team evaluating agents against their specific framework requirements and quality standards. That phased validation built the institutional confidence to move forward at the firm level.
For Kevin, who has spent eight years doing HITRUST work and four years running every engagement through Fieldguide, Field Agents represent a meaningful shift in how his team spends its time. The manual, sequential testing that has always defined the most labor-intensive phase of a HITRUST engagement can now run in the background while practitioners focus on advisory work, client relationships, and professional judgment.
"Every project I run through on Fieldguide is light years better than the dated process of Excel sheets and SharePoint folders," Kevin says.
With a firm-wide rollout on the horizon, FD's HITRUST practice is preparing to operate with significantly more capacity, and a clear sense of where to invest it.