THE ROLE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN TRANSFORMING MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING PRACTICES: AUTOMATION, ANALYTICS, AND STRATEGIC DECISION-MAKING IN MODERN ORGANIZATIONS

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how organizations produce and use the information they rely on to plan, control, and allocate resources. Accounting scholarship has documented many individual pieces of this shift automation projects, predictive-analytics applications, professional skill change but the pieces are rarely put together. This paper works through what happens when they are. Drawing on accounting and information-systems research published mainly between 2017 and 2026, it argues that AI's real significance for management accounting is not the automation of individual tasks but the reshaping of the whole pathway from raw organizational data to strategic action. That pathway is described here as a progression: AI-enabled process automation feeds into integrated information and advanced analytics, which in turn support decision intelligence but only where human judgement remains actively involved. Machine learning extends what management accounting can predict and measure; generative AI changes how accountants interact with information in the first place. Neither guarantees better decisions on its own. Data quality, governance, explainability, professional competence, and organizational readiness all determine whether AI output becomes usable managerial knowledge, and the paper's central contribution is a human–AI decision-intelligence framework built around that condition. The framework treats automation and analytics as necessary but insufficient: value is created only when technological capability is filtered through professional judgement operating inside adequate governance.