When I was studying accounting, most of the obvious career paths felt stable and respectable. None felt particularly interesting. I wanted to understand how things worked, solve problems, and connect ideas, but I did not yet have language for that kind of role.
A classroom idea that stayed with me
One day, the Director of Internal Audit at a hospital visited one of my classes. I do not remember every detail of his presentation, but I remember how he described the function: not only compliance and controls, but process improvement, operational effectiveness, and an understanding of how the whole organization worked.
For the first time, I heard someone describe a role that was not confined to one department. I left the classroom curious. That curiosity ended up shaping my career.
I did not know what internal audit was
People often imagine checklists, controls, and compliance reviews. Those things exist. What surprised me was how much of the work involved learning businesses.
One engagement might focus on procurement, another on payroll, inventory, cybersecurity, human resources, or operations. At first, it felt like I was constantly starting over. Over time, I realized I was not studying separate departments. I was studying the same organization from different angles.
Problems ignore the organizational chart
A reporting problem in finance may begin in operations. An operational bottleneck may come from a technology limitation. A technology issue may have less to do with software than with communication, training, or decision-making.
Every process depends on another process. Every team relies on information created elsewhere. Once I started seeing organizations this way, it became difficult to examine a problem without asking what was happening upstream and downstream.
The advantage nobody talks about
Internal audit gave me exposure to organizations across industries, sizes, and levels of maturity. At first, each company felt unique. Then patterns emerged.
Some organizations made work easier. Others accumulated layers of complexity nobody questioned. Some teams created value; others spent their energy navigating workarounds, spreadsheets, and institutional knowledge. The more versions I saw, the easier it became to recognize where friction was hiding.
Why process improvement felt obvious
My move into process improvement was not really a career change. Internal audit taught me how organizations worked. Process improvement gave me the opportunity to help them work better.
Years of audit work had created a library of patterns in my head: where approvals pile up, information disconnects, ownership becomes unclear, and manual workarounds appear because systems are not serving people properly.
The same curiosity shows up in AI
Once you spend enough time studying processes, repetitive work becomes impossible to ignore. You notice people moving information between systems, maintaining spreadsheets because platforms do not communicate, and following approvals whose purpose has been forgotten.
Automation and AI interest me for the same reason internal audit did: I am fascinated by how work gets done. The technology changes, but the question remains: how can people spend less time fighting systems and more time doing meaningful work?
What stayed with me
Internal audit taught me controls, risk, and compliance. More importantly, it gave me a way of seeing organizations: as relationships between people, systems, decisions, incentives, and processes.
Whether I am improving a workflow, automating a process, implementing a system, or helping clarify a website, I am still trying to understand how the pieces fit together.
The tools have changed. The curiosity has not. Every organization still feels like a puzzle worth solving.