Clients no longer view SOC 2 as an annual event. When a SaaS company faces a vendor security questionnaire in March, needs to renew cyber insurance in July, and closes an enterprise deal requiring current attestation in October, they expect their auditor to support readiness throughout the year, not just during the formal examination period.
This creates a fundamental mismatch: traditional point-in-time assessment models can't deliver the ongoing guidance clients increasingly demand. Firms attempting to provide year-round support using manual processes quickly discover the economics don't work, forcing them either to decline advisory opportunities or subsidize continuous support at commodity pricing.
Engagement automation supported by AI resolves this tension by streamlining evidence collection and preliminary control testing within practitioner-defined parameters. This makes continuous SOC 2 advisory economically viable without compromising reviewability or professional judgment.
Why continuous SOC 2 compliance matters for audit and advisory firms
The SOC reporting services market will reach $9.1 billion by 2033, representing a 9.2% compound annual growth rate that outpaces the 6.7% median revenue growth most CPA firms experience. This growth trajectory creates premium opportunities as engagement complexity accelerates faster than hiring pipelines can support.
Rising complexity creates advisory opportunities
KPMG’s Control Assurance Benchmarking Report documents critical trends transforming SOC 2 from commodity attestation into advisory-rich engagements. Three data points reveal the scale of this complexity shift:
- Nearly half of SOC 2 reports now contain 100 or more controls, with 15% exceeding 200 controls, representing increasing engagement complexity
- Multi-framework 'SOC 2+' reports simultaneously address ISO 27001, HITRUST, or other frameworks are increasingly common
- Only 2% of SOC 2 Type 2 reports contain zero exceptions—meaning 98% contain findings requiring remediation and creating recurring advisory opportunities beyond pure attestation work
Organizations with cloud-native architectures, DevOps pipelines, and distributed systems require sustained preparation. Scrambling for evidence during a two-week fieldwork window doesn't work for these complex environments. SOC 2 Type 2 examinations inherently require extended observation periods, with minimum three-month windows for first-time engagements and typical operating effectiveness testing spanning three to twelve months. This extended observation period exists because auditors must evaluate whether controls operated effectively and consistently over time, a fundamental requirement that cannot be satisfied through point-in-time testing.
Clients now expect year-round compliance support
Cyber insurance carriers increasingly require SOC 2 attestations. Vendor risk management programs mandate current reports, and enterprise buyers won't sign contracts without validated security controls. This creates ongoing demand for continuous audit readiness on compressed timelines. Firms can position themselves to support year-round compliance frameworks rather than annual point-in-time assessments. Premium opportunities exist for delivering multi-year advisory relationships that address ongoing control gaps.
Firms that help clients maintain year-round readiness and continuous evidence collection transform what would otherwise become evidence-gathering scrambles in the final months into structured validation exercises, improving engagement profitability while reducing staff burnout.
Why manual processes can't support continuous compliance
Staffing shortages are an ongoing constraint: a near-universal challenge that compounds with SOC 2's inherently resource-intensive characteristics.
Senior-heavy staffing requirements
SOC 2 engagements demand more senior-heavy team structures than traditional financial statement audits:
- Senior Manager provides engagement oversight and client relationship management
- Manager handles day-to-day execution and coordinates testing procedures
- Auditor conducts testing and evidence collection activities
This 1:1:1 leverage ratio creates direct competition for scarce senior resources already under capacity pressure from market-wide hiring constraints. Type 2 examinations require sustained resource commitments across multi-month observation periods, creating complex scheduling challenges fundamentally different from point-in-time audit approaches. Managing multiple SOC clients with varied fiscal year-ends and competing deadlines intensifies these capacity pressures.
Managing evidence across concurrent engagements
When practitioners handle five SOC 2 assessments simultaneously, manual spreadsheet updates to track control testing status across multiple engagements consume significant capacity that could support higher-value activities.
When evidence requests, test procedures, and workpaper reviews live across disconnected systems such as email, spreadsheets, and documents, managers lose real-time visibility into engagement status.
Expanding into AI governance and emerging controls
Breaking apart SOC report components reveals foundational elements including considerations around security, how the organization is governing the development of the technology, checking the competency of the individuals charged with the development, and identifying what are the key metrics. CPAs are increasingly providing assurance over AI systems within SOC 2 frameworks. This scope expansion creates efficiency challenges as auditors need new technical competencies beyond traditional IT controls, with manual evaluation methodologies required for emerging control areas without established efficiency frameworks.
AI automation for evidence collection and control testing
AI supports SOC 2 workflows by assisting with repetitive, rules-based activities such as organizing evidence, mapping systems to controls, and summarizing risk data. These capabilities reduce manual effort while auditors retain responsibility for all control evaluations and conclusions. The technology assists auditors throughout the engagement lifecycle by streamlining manual processes while preserving the fundamental principle that humans make all significant decisions requiring skepticism and contextual understanding.
What AI can and cannot do in SOC 2 engagements
The technology accelerates preliminary information gathering, but practitioners still determine which controls, processes, or risks are significant enough to include in engagement scope, a judgment AI cannot make. For engagements involving 150+ controls, this preliminary mapping and evidence gathering saves significant time on manual documentation review.
When controls require evidence of quarterly access reviews, AI can extract relevant information from lengthy audit logs or access reports and flag items for practitioner review. This approach reduces manual scanning of hundreds of pages, freeing practitioners to focus their expertise on high-value evaluation activities. Once practitioners configure what constitutes a passing control test, acceptable deviation rates, required approval hierarchies, mandatory documentation elements, AI validates effective operation within those parameters and flags exceptions requiring human review.
Professional judgment boundaries
Attestation standards establish that AI cannot determine which controls, processes, or risks are significant enough to include in SOC 2 engagements, nor can it replace the expertise and ethics that safeguard audit quality. Instead, AI functions as an audit-grade assistant that enhances efficiency and consistency while auditors:
- Validate outputs using professional skepticism
- Apply contextual understanding to determine control scope and significance
- Maintain proper documentation of all significant decisions
- Ensure compliance with existing attestation standards
AI improves efficiency and consistency in SOC 2 audits, but it does not replace the human expertise, ethics, and professional skepticism that underpin audit quality and client trust. Attestation standards and the Trust Services Criteria remain unchanged, requiring practitioners to ensure AI-supported outputs are reviewable, properly documented, and clearly tied to engagement procedures, with all significant conclusions formed through professional judgment under existing SSAE frameworks.
While research shows AI reallocation of approximately 8.5% of practitioner time away from routine data collection, SOC 2-specific efficiency metrics have not been published by authoritative sources, making profession-wide claims about time savings premature without firm-specific validation.
Engagement automation platforms like Fieldguide support these efficiency gains by structuring control testing workflows, evidence review, and documentation within the engagement. Practitioners define testing parameters, review outputs, and retain full responsibility for sampling decisions and final conclusions.
Four steps to year-round SOC 2 readiness
Continuous SOC 2 compliance transforms audit preparation from an annual event into an ongoing operational discipline where controls are monitored and evidence is collected throughout the year.
Four steps establish the foundation for achieving sustainable compliance:
- Framework mapping establishes the foundation by aligning organizational controls to SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria
- Control gap assessment identifies where current controls don't meet requirements
- Management attestation creates the foundation for management assertions about control design and operation
- Technology for continuous compliance implements GRC solutions to manage frameworks, track control gaps, gather evidence, and provide ongoing reports to leadership
This approach addresses a fundamental challenge: many organizations incorrectly consider SOC 2 an annual exercise, but cloud-based control environments change rapidly, necessitating continuous approaches. When clients treat SOC 2 as a point-in-time exercise, rather than the ongoing operational discipline the framework requires, they discover control failures during formal examinations rather than addressing them proactively. These control failures create exceptions that delay report issuance and erode client confidence in your firm's guidance.
The economics of continuous readiness
Clients cannot "pass" Type 2 assessments through last-minute preparation because the examination structure itself mandates sustained evidence of control operation across the entire measurement period. Organizations that establish ongoing control assessment and evidence collection practices make subsequent SOC 2 compliance assessments more efficient because controls were validated throughout the year rather than requiring practitioners to reconstruct evidence of effectiveness months after the fact.
In documented Fieldguide client implementations, year-round readiness approaches combined with engagement automation have enabled some firms to double audit capacity, with certain practices completing three to four audits weekly compared to one to two historically, while reducing on-site travel by up to 75%.
Service delivery models
Firms support year-round readiness through several structured approaches:
- Readiness assessment programs evaluate client preparedness before formal audits begin, helping organizations identify and remediate gaps during less time-sensitive periods.
- Phased progression approaches start with SOC 2 Type 1 assessments to demonstrate controls are designed appropriately before progressing to Type 2 operating effectiveness examinations.
- GRC implementation support enables clients to implement solutions for ongoing control monitoring, managing framework documentation, and gathering evidence continuously.
- Multi-framework advisory addresses engagements that integrate multiple security frameworks simultaneously, leveraging evidence collected for SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria across overlapping requirements.
The distinction between continuous monitoring technology and continuous audit support matters for positioning your services appropriately. Continuous monitoring refers to real-time automated control testing through compliance platforms that integrate with client systems.
Continuous audit support means structured control framework management, ongoing readiness assessments, systematic evidence gathering processes, and year-round guidance on maintaining controls between formal audit periods. Your role as auditor is to examine whether controls are designed appropriately and operated effectively, validating client-maintained continuous readiness rather than providing monitoring technology itself.
Modernize your SOC 2 practice with engagement automation
SOC 2 demand is outpacing traditional capacity models. Rising engagement complexity creates premium advisory opportunities beyond commodity attestation. Year-round compliance support and exception remediation require substantial partner and manager capacity for control scoping decisions, remediation strategies, and client advisory relationships that cannot be delegated or automated away.
Engagement automation platforms create this capacity by streamlining routine audit execution. When evidence collection, control testing, and workpaper management happen efficiently through platforms like Fieldguide, managers and partners reclaim time for strategic work: architecting continuous readiness programs, positioning for premium multi-framework assessments, and transforming exception-laden reports into advisory relationships.
To free capacity for high-value SOC 2 advisory work, schedule a demo to see how Fieldguide streamlines audit execution.
Amanda Waldmann
Increasing trust with AI for audit and advisory firms.
