Artificial Intelligence in Audit and Accounting: Development, Current Trends, Opportunities and Threats - Literature Review

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the current situation regarding artificial intelligence in audit and accounting, including the newest trends, opportunities and threats. Due to its innovative character, this field is constantly changing, with the biggest companies investing enormous amounts of capital to achieve wide use of artificial intelligence in audit and accounting. One of the main goals of the paper is to provide an analysis of audit tasks that benefit from artificial intelligence implementation, with an emphasis on risk assessment. Another goal is to outline artificial intelligence technologies used in audit and accounting. The most practical purpose of the paper is to evaluate the current applications and audit tools developed by Big4 companies, the four leading consulting companies in audit and accounting. The results of the paper include overview of seven essential audit tasks proving the significance of using artificial intelligence in accounting and audit process. The research also confirmed that the technologies most commonly used are genetic algorithms and programming, fuzzy systems, neural networks and hybrid systems, the combination of the aforementioned technologies, with the synthesis of expert systems and neural networks proven to be the most successful. Finally, the practical result of this paper is a summary of the Big4 latest developed artificial intelligence tools and innovations, mainly for audit planning, benchmarking and documents analysis.