Meet the 2026 Connector Award winners

The winner

Fortive is a global organization that innovates essential technologies to keep the world safe and productive. Its federated model gives its portfolio of operating companies room to move fast, but it makes standardizing controls across the company a challenge.

The challenge

Before Optro, SOX testing relied on numerous manual Excel-based workflows across multiple locations. Data and documentation were decentralized across teams, evidence collection was manual, and testing methodologies varied by location, making it difficult to achieve consistent quality, standardized execution, and enterprise-wide visibility into testing status and risk.

The solution

Fortive centralized its SOX program within Optro in 2020, standardizing processes, data, and documentation across operating companies. In 2026, Fortive enhanced the platform with AI-enabled capabilities, including MCP integration, APIs, and workflow orchestration, transforming Optro into an intelligent, end-to-end SOX automation platform. What began as a manual, evidence-driven testing process has evolved into continuous monitoring, leveraging machine learning to correlate ServiceNow and Oracle access data for real-time risk identification and review. Today, the platform supports more than 600 users globally, providing scalable, standardized oversight across the organization.

The impact

By implementing Optro workflows, including continuous monitoring of access changes, Fortive significantly reduced control exceptions, cut testing time and effort by approximately 30%, and is transitioning from quarterly to annual access reviews, reducing review effort by another 75%. Procedures that once took days now run in real time, transforming Internal Audit from a periodic reviewer into a proactive, real-time risk intelligence function.

The winner

GE Aerospace invents the future of flight and runs its internal audit function under the same safety, quality, delivery, cost (SQDC) discipline that guides the business.

The challenge: Manual, episodic reporting extended audit cycles and increased rework. Remediation plans and evidence moved through email, fragmenting audit trails and burying teams in follow-up and version control issues.

The solution: GE Aerospace ran FLIGHT DECK-aligned kaizen events to redesign scoping, reporting, and action-plan management, then used Optro to standardize the new workflows — moving evidence requests and stakeholder uploads directly into the platform.

The impact: Reporting days fell 41%, and month-to-month overdue action plans dropped 44%. Today, 40% of audits include analytical procedures, with full population testing replacing sampling in more places, freeing auditors to spend less time chasing documentation and more time on risk judgment.

The winner

Eaton is a global intelligent power management company supporting critical infrastructure — utilities, data centers, aerospace, mobility and more — across more than 180 countries.

The challenge

Eaton's legacy SOX program and internal audit team were merging, each running separate tools and manual processes. A new second-line compliance function (Controls Compliance & Advisory {CCA}) and their existing Infosec teams were also establishing new control monitoring and assurance programs. Multiple “sources of truth” and inconsistent documentation left leaders with limited visibility across Eaton's risk and control landscape.

The solution

Eaton built a single, shared platform in Optro — bringing internal audit, IT risk, compliance, and cybersecurity into one system of record. Teams now use CrossComply for cross-framework control mapping and Workstream to run standardized, repeatable compliance workflows.

The impact

Eaton has increased control and risk visibility and engagement throughout the enterprise. The Infosec team has established a Unified GRC control framework and leveraged CrossComply to de-scope 12% of controls based on standardization and risk profiling. Internal Audit, Compliance, and Infosec teams now share a common platform for reporting issues, tracking compliance, and ensuring control execution across the enterprise. Collectively the teams run ~7000 workstream tasks annually spanning 30 different use cases. Instead of debating whose spreadsheet is right, all teams now work from the same controls, evidence, and facts.

The winner

Verizon powers connectivity and entertainment services for individuals and organizations across the country.

The challenge

Verizon's legacy audit platform demanded over 60% of business intelligence staff time on manual data extraction before analysis could even begin, stretching report cycles to 2-3 weeks and leaving audit data siloed from the rest of the enterprise.

The solution

Verizon rebuilt internal audit as a real-time intelligence function on Optro's open API architecture, connecting live data pipelines to Tableau, Alteryx, and its proprietary AI platform, JARVIS Core — with an integration to Optro's Model Context Protocol server now in development.

The impact

The team replaced rigid annual audit cycles with weekly risk calibration, saving over 1,500 hours annually and cutting overdue action plans by more than 20%. Security executives can now query live data directly instead of second-guessing dashboards, driving faster, better-informed decisions on emerging threats.

The winner

Humana's mission is to improve the healthcare system and deliver the best consumer healthcare experience.

The challenge

When Erin took on an expanded risk mandate in May 2025, she inherited enterprise and operational risk registers scattered across disconnected, lower-maturity systems — creating potential blind spots among internal audit, SOX, ERM, and ORM.

The solution

Erin championed a migration of Humana's enterprise and operational risk registers onto Optro, expanding beyond internal audit and SOX into RiskOversight and Controls Management to build a single, connected risk register.

The impact

Humana now has a roadmap they are executing on to get to one source of truth spanning audit and enterprise risk with a longer term vision of continuous control monitoring. Beyond her own organization, Erin serves on Optro's Customer Advisory Board and has shared Humana's transformation on stages that include the IIA Standards Masterclass and Optro’s CRX flagship conference.

The winner

Reddit is a global online community where people gather to share, debate, and go deep on shared interests. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024.

The challenge

SOX testing was internal audit's most automation-resistant workflow. Evidence arrived in every format imaginable — PDFs with barely-parseable tables, merged-cell spreadsheets, screenshots, scanned documents — with no consistent schema. Traditional RPA couldn't handle the variability, and rigorous PCAOB documentation standards meant the team was stuck manually testing controls: reliable, but impossible to scale.

The solution

After running head-to-head pilots across vendors, Reddit's internal audit team selected Optro's Autonomous Testing to run a governed, multi-agent workflow — evidence agents that extract and structure data, testing agents that evaluate it against criteria, review agents that flag edge cases, and documentation agents that generate work papers directly in their external auditor's template, complete with tickmarks and annotations showing exactly what the AI evaluated and why. A human-in-the-loop review stayed in place throughout.

The impact

In three months after purchasing Autonomous Testing, the team automated 175 controls — over 40% of their SOX scope — across every control and test type, cutting testing time per control by 60% on average. AI caught issues human testers missed, and more recently, the team is using agentic testing for over 75% of their SOX controls, having extended use to other recurring testing programs with plans to target over 90% automation overall.