Big Data and Knowledge Management with Applications in Accounting and Auditing: The Case of Watson

The purpose of this paper is to investigate big data and knowledge management in the context of so-called cognitive systems, with a particular focus on IBM’s Watson as a case to illustrate both an emerging form of knowledge management and how firms are analyzing big data to generate knowledge from data. This analysis includes a number of applications that have been developed to address a number of accounting and auditing problems. In particular, this paper analyzes how Watson has been brought into business settings and used or proposed for use in accounting, auditing and finance.