Artificial Intelligence in Accounting: Organisational and Ethical Implications

Artificial intelligence (AI) and Big Data based applications in accounting and auditing have become pervasive in recent years. However, research on the societal implications of the widespread and partly unregulated use of AI and Big Data in several industries remains scarce despite salient and competing utopian and dystopian narratives.

This book focuses on the transformation of accounting and auditing based on AI and Big Data. It not only provides a thorough and critical overview of the status-quo and the reports surrounding these technologies, but it also presents a future outlook on the ethical and normative implications concerning opportunities, risks, and limits. The book discusses topics such as future, human-machine collaboration, cybernetic approaches to decision-making, and ethical guidelines for good corporate governance of AI-based algorithms and Big Data in accounting and auditing. It clarifies the issues surrounding the digital transformation in this arena, delineates its boundaries, and highlights the essential issues and debates within and concerning this rapidly developing field. The authors develop a range of analytic approaches to the subject, both appreciative and sceptical, and synthesise new theoretical constructs that make better sense of human-machine collaborations in accounting and auditing.

This book offers academics a variety of new research and theory building on digital accounting and auditing from and for accounting and auditing scholars, economists, organisations, and management academics and political and philosophical thinkers. Also, as a landmark work in a new area of current policy interest, it will engage regulators and policy makers, reflective practitioners, and media commentators through its authoritative contributions, editorial framing and discussion, and sector studies and cases.

Othmar M. Lehner is a professor and director of the Hanken Center for Accounting, Finance and Governance at the Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki. His research combines accounting, information sciences, and organisation theory to drive forward societal insights on sustainability and the digitalisation of work processes.

Carina Knoll is an aspiring researcher in the field of Digital Accounting at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. Bringing a background in sociology and management from the Johannes Kepler University of Upper Austria, her interest is the humanist implications of the digital transformation in accounting and auditing.