Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation in Accounting Management: A Theoretical Review of Emerging Trends, Opportunities Challenges and Future Directions

Abstract

Accounting and management scholarship frequently uses “digital transformation” as a synonym for adopting artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced technologies, a usage this paper argues collapses a theoretically important distinction the broader information-systems literature has worked carefully to establish. Verhoef and colleagues distinguish digitization, the conversion of analog information into digital form, from digitalization, the use of digital technology to automate discrete existing processes, from digital transformation proper, a more fundamental reconfiguration of how an organization creates and captures value. This paper argues that a substantial share of what accounting and management research currently celebrates as AI-driven digital transformation is, on this more precise definition, actually digitalization: automation of existing processes at greater speed and scale, without the accompanying reconfiguration of value-creation logic that would justify the stronger label. Drawing on Vial's influential eight-building-block framework for digital transformation alongside recent evidence on AI adoption, decision-authority calibration, and organizational governance, the paper reviews emerging trends, opportunities, and challenges in AI-enabled accounting and management, and argues that Vial's original framework, like much of the subsequent literature, underweights the ethical and governance building block this paper's review suggests has become at least as consequential as the technological building blocks the framework more thoroughly develops. The paper proposes a revised model incorporating this governance layer explicitly, and closes with a research and practice agenda for closing the gap between AI-enabled digitalization, now well documented, and the genuine digital transformation accounting and management scholarship continues to promise.