Exploring the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Accounting: An Academic and Practitioner Perspective

This chapter investigates the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and accounting using academics’ and practitioners’ perspectives to understand how this new technology can modify accountants’ working activities. The chapter adopts a content and thematic analysis of 259 academic sources extracted from the Scopus database and 157 practitioners’ sources retrieved from Business Source Ultimate. The academics’ and practitioners’ debate highlights some initial results. First, the exploration reveals practical examples of AI implementation for accounting, financial reporting, and auditing. Second, the analysis shows trading zones of knowledge between enthusiastic practitioners’ literature and less confident academic literature. Third, our research discovers a stream of literature between the information systems theory and management analysis that looks at the new data economy. Regarding implications, the authors aim to connect academics’ and practitioners’ views by understanding new potential innovations for working for accountants and auditors. This contribution is novel because it investigates the issues arising from the relationship between AI and accounting with a broad spectrum (including auditing and accountability fields) by examining original practitioners’ sources. This can enhance our knowledge-creating bridges between academics and practitioners for building the CPAs (i.e., certified public accountants) and CIAs (i.e., certified internal auditors) of the future.