Elevating the Standard for Compliance and Controls Testing: How Grant Thornton Uses Zania

AI-Accelerated Nevada Gaming MICS Audit Testing

How a leading professional services firm deployed Zania’s AI compliance agents to accelerate Nevada Gaming Minimum Internal Control Standards (MICS) audit testing with greater accuracy and no compromise on rigor.

The Vision: A Higher Standard for Regulated Audit Testing

Grant Thornton is a leading professional services firm providing audit, tax, and advisory services across highly regulated industries globally. Within its Advisory practice, Grant Thornton supports clients navigating Nevada Gaming Board (NGB) MICS audit requirements; engagements that demand exacting evidence standards, clear traceability, and conclusions that can withstand scrutiny from regulators, audit committees, and executive leadership.

For Grant Thornton’s Advisory team, every assessment carries the firm’s name. Every finding must be defensible. And as engagement volume grows, so does the operational burden of delivering that standard consistently.

The Challenge: Scaling Rigor Without Scaling Headcount

Nevada Gaming MICS audits are operationally intensive. Casino-provided evidence arrives across dozens of files and hundreds of pages, spanning a wide range of operational record types. Manually working through this volume while maintaining complete traceability between evidence, requirements, and conclusions places significant pressure on auditor time.

The Manual Toll on Strategic Time

Auditors were spending disproportionate hours on evidence organization, cross-referencing records across multiple files, and drafting workpapers operational work that consumed time better spent on judgment-intensive advisory. For a firm whose value lies in expertise, not administration, this was an unsustainable allocation.

Consistency Across Engagements

Maintaining the same standard of rigor across every control procedure regardless of evidence complexity or which auditor is on the engagement  is notoriously difficult at scale. Consistency is a quality problem as much as a capacity one.

Depth Within Each Sample

Nevada Gaming evidence is dense and distributed across dozens of file types and operational records. Traditional manual review, constrained by time, can only go so deep into each sample before the next control demands attention.

“The manual process was solid, but it didn’t scale with the pricing demands of our clients. We needed a way to maintain the rigor and quality on every control test, while still being cost effective”

— Shawn Stewart, Partner within Grant Thornton's Cyber & Risk Advisory Practice

The Solution: AI Compliance Agents Purpose-Built for Regulated Audit Work

To address these constraints, Grant Thornton evaluated Zania’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) compliance agents across a comprehensive set of Nevada Gaming MICS audit procedures. The platform was tested against the full range of casino-provided evidence types encountered in live engagements:

• Fill slips and marker documentation

• Jackpot records and cage documentation

• Variance reports and audit logs

• Operational reports and reconciliations

• Policies, procedures, and supporting audit artifacts

While the engagement was scoped to Nevada Gaming MICS, the underlying workflow covers evidence synthesis, control testing, and audit-ready output generation. These are the same challenges compliance and advisory teams face across any heavily regulated framework, from SOC 2 and ISO 27001 to NIST CSF and beyond.

Deeper Analysis Within the Sample

Rather than evaluating evidence in isolation, Zania’s agents reasoned across the full set of casino-provided sample evidence simultaneously, working across dozens of records, multiple file types, and hundreds of pages at once. This enabled more thorough analysis of each sample than a time-constrained manual review would allow, surfacing findings that might otherwise be missed.

Audit-Defensible Outputs

The platform produced structured audit results mapped directly to specific control requirements, not generic summaries. Outputs were organized around the control being evaluated, with source documents and requirement references built into the structure. They arrived ready for advisor review, not as rough drafts requiring reconstruction.

Consistency by Design

Because Zania’s agents apply the same analytical process to every control procedure, variability introduced by manual review is eliminated. The standard of rigor on the final assessment is the same as on the first.

“What stood out was the traceability. Every conclusion was tied back to the specific evidence it came from, mapped to the exact MICS requirement it addressed. That’s what you need when a finding must hold up in front of a regulator.”

— Josh Constant, Senior Manager within Grant Thornton's Cyber & Risk Advisory Practice

The Results: Auditors Back to Advising

By deploying Zania’s AI compliance agents, Grant Thornton materially improved the efficiency and accuracy of its Nevada Gaming MICS audit testing without compromising the rigor its clients and regulators expect.

Output Accuracy

Conclusions aligned closely with expected MICS audit outcomes across all testing scenarios, with a level of specificity that matched what an experienced auditor would produce. Across every control tested, the platform distinguished compliant from non-compliant scenarios with clear, evidence-backed rationale.

Material Reduction in Manual Review Time

Review workflows that traditionally required multiple hours of manual analysis were completed in a fraction of the time. The reduction was consistent across control procedures regardless of evidence complexity, allowing auditors to move through engagements at a pace that was not previously achievable without compromising depth.

Deeper Findings, Same Sample

Working within the same casino-provided evidence set, the depth of analysis translated directly into output quality. For controls involving complex, multi-file evidence, conclusions reflected the full picture of available documentation, not  the portion a single auditor could reasonably process in the time available.

Unyielding Consistency

Evidence review and gap identification became standardized across every control procedure. Grant Thornton could stand behind every assessment with equal confidence; the 50th control held to the same standard as the first, without depending on which auditor was on the engagement.

“Zania’s AI compliance agents materially reduced the manual effort of Nevada Gaming MICS audit procedures while maintaining the rigor, traceability, and defensibility required in regulated gaming environments, and the consistency of outputs exceeded our expectations.”

— Josh Constant, Senior Manager within Grant Thornton's Cyber & Risk Advisory Practice

Most importantly, Grant Thornton’s Advisory team regained time for the work that requires their expertise. Evidence review and workpaper drafting are operational necessities, but they are not where an advisory firm creates value. Zania took that burden off the team so they could stay focused on the judgment-intensive work that clients actually pay for.