Traack vs Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is a general agent over Microsoft 365. You describe an outcome, it plans the work, carries it out across your mail, files, calendar and Teams, and checks in along the way. It is genuinely good at that, and if your organisation already lives entirely inside Microsoft 365 and you need agents fast, Copilot is a great choice.

Traack AI agents are specialized in internal audit and SOX control testing work, and built for internal audit / SOX compliance teams. We capture your company's institutional knowledge, the custom workflows and testing procedures your team does by hand, and our agents run continuous testing on those procedures. Every step and action the agent takes is recorded so an external auditor can follow.

If you want a simple AI assistant across your Microsoft ecosystem, use Copilot. If you are looking to speed up the busy work of internal audit and SOX testing, Traack agents help with that.

Who Copilot is for

• Your team already works in Microsoft 365 and you want general AI help with things like summarising meetings, drafting emails and getting a first version of something on the page.
• What you need out the other end is a Word document, an Excel model or a slide deck.
• You want one assistant that everybody can use, rather than a separate tool for each team.
• Your security team would rather not take on another vendor. Copilot runs inside your own Microsoft tenant, so it already sits under the permissions and policies you have.

Who Traack is for

Traack is for internal audit and SOX compliance teams.

• You test the same controls every quarter, and most of the work is doing it again rather than working out how.
• You test a sample because testing everything by hand would take too long.
• You have to hand a workpaper to a reviewer, or to your external auditor, and show how you got to every answer in it.
• Your evidence is scattered across Salesforce, QuickBooks, Jira, Slack, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
• You want the way your team tests a control written down once, then run the same way every time.
• Your own security review starts with retention, isolation and encryption, and wants specifics rather than reassurance.

Where Traack stands out

These are the parts a general assistant was never built for, and they are where most of the time goes.

• It knows the framework. The agent is grounded in COSO's Internal Control-Integrated Framework, so it uses the five components, keeps design and operating effectiveness apart, and is careful with words like deficiency and material weakness. It will not call something a material weakness because it sounded serious.
• We write your test procedures with you. We sit down with your team and get it on paper: what the population is, which attributes matter, where the thresholds sit, what counts as an exception. After that the agent runs it the same way every quarter. Nobody has to remember how to word the request.
• It tests everything, not a sample. The agent runs Python across every row in the export. Teams sample because doing it by hand is slow, and once the procedure runs itself that reason mostly goes away. It also checks the population is complete first, because a clean result on half the data is worth nothing.
• It shows its working. Every command it runs, every query it makes and every answer it gets back is saved, and you can replay the lot. Each conclusion points at the file, the field and the row it came from, which is what your external auditor will ask for.
• It leaves the judgement to you. Anything unclear gets flagged for a person rather than quietly passed, and nothing is filed until a reviewer signs it off.
• Your evidence stays yours. It never trains a model, ours or anyone else's, and the providers we use keep nothing once a request finishes. Everyone works in their own isolated workspace, everything is encrypted, and you decide when it is deleted. More detail further down.
• It remembers the work, not just you. Everyone gets their own workspace that stays put between sessions. The evidence you uploaded, the scripts the agent wrote and last quarter's workpaper are all still there next time you open it, so you pick up where you left off instead of starting again.
• It keeps testing without being asked. Once a procedure exists, it runs against new records as they arrive. Exceptions turn up the week they happen instead of at quarter end, and the workpaper is mostly written by the time your reviewers get to it.
• It connects to where your evidence actually is. Scoped access you can switch off whenever you want, and read-only until you say otherwise.

The systems we connect to, all read-only until you approve otherwise:

SalesforceQuickBooksJiraSlackGoogle DriveGoogle SheetsGmailGoogle CalendarOneDriveOutlook

Side by side

Data governance, privacy and security

Audit evidence names people, shows how money moves and records where controls failed. It is the most sensitive material your team handles, so here are the specifics rather than the reassurance.

• Your evidence is never used to train a model, ours or anyone else's. The model providers we use work under zero data retention agreements, so nothing is kept on their side once a request finishes.
• Everyone works in their own isolated workspace with its own storage. Evidence never crosses between people, teams or clients.
• Everything is encrypted, both in transit and at rest: uploaded files, workspace contents, database records and backups.
• You decide what is kept. Files and threads go when you delete them, and the whole workspace goes within 30 days of a written request or the end of the contract.
• The agent only reads unless you say otherwise. Anything that would send, change or delete stops and asks you first, and the log records who said yes.
• Integrations use access you can revoke at any time, either from Traack or from the system itself.
• Every action, by us or by the agent, is written to a log you can read and export.
• You sign in with Google or a one-time email code, so there is no password to store. Single sign-on is available for organisations.

These are the answers your own security review will ask for, and they are the same ones we give your auditors. Customers under NDA can ask us for the SOC 2 Type II report, penetration test summaries and the subprocessor list. The security page has the full detail.

The control question you will be asked about us

Whichever tool you pick, somebody on your side has to answer for it. COSO put out guidance in February 2026 on internal control over generative AI, applying the same five components to AI systems rather than treating them as a special case. Expect to be asked how the AI you brought in is controlled, and expect to answer with evidence rather than a policy.

That is the question Traack is built for. The agent only reads unless you approve otherwise. Everything it runs and everything it gets back is saved and replayable, so you can show what happened rather than describe it. Each person's evidence is kept separate, none of it trains a model, and you decide when it goes.

A general assistant answers a smaller version of the question. Tenant permissions tell you who could have reached what. They do not hand a reviewer the actual sequence of steps behind a conclusion, on which records, in what order. That second part is what an audit rests on, and it is what we built around.

How to decide

• Pick one control you test every quarter and write down the population, the attributes, the thresholds and what counts as an exception.
• Ask both products to do it end to end on real evidence, twice, a week apart.
• Compare the two runs. Is it the same test both times? Can a reviewer see which records were tested and why each exception came up?
• Then show the output to whoever reviews your workpapers and ask whether they would sign it.

Sources

What we say about Copilot here comes from Microsoft's own material, checked in September 2026. The agentic behaviour described is Copilot Cowork, which reached general availability in June 2026, and the plugin catalogue was last updated on 1 September 2026. Microsoft moves quickly and that catalogue keeps growing, so if you spot something out of date, tell us and we will fix it.

• Microsoft Adoption — Copilot Cowork for AI users
• Journal of Accountancy — COSO creates audit-ready guidance for governing generative AI
• Microsoft Learn — Available plugins for Copilot Cowork
• Microsoft Learn — Salesforce CRM connector for Microsoft 365 Copilot
• SiliconANGLE — Microsoft accelerates agentic automation with Copilot Cowork