Professional Meaning and Ethical Adaptation of Accountants in AI-Driven Accounting Systems
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Abstract
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into financial management and accounting practices has transformed the professional landscape, reshaping how accountants engage with technology, ethics, and professional judgment. Within this evolving digital ecosystem, understanding the subjective experiences of accountants adapting to AI-based systems has become an important yet underexplored area in accounting research. However, existing studies primarily emphasize system efficiency and adoption behavior, leaving unclear how professionals experience and interpret this technological transformation in their daily practice. Therefore, this study explicitly aims to examine how accountants make sense of AI integration, how they respond to emerging ethical complexities, and how these experiences influence their professional identity. This study employs an interpretative phenomenological approach (IPA) to explore how accountants construct meaning, navigate ethical challenges, and reconstruct professional identity in response to AI integration. Data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews with twelve accountants across public and private sectors who had direct experience with digital accounting technologies. The analysis revealed four major themes: emotional adaptation and professional displacement, redefinition of identity in digital contexts, ethical awareness in human–AI interaction, and cognitive transformation through learning resilience. These findings highlight that the adaptation process extends beyond technical competence it is an emotional, moral, and existential negotiation within the self. The study concludes that digital transformation in accounting should be understood as a human-centered experience that intertwines emotion, ethics, and cognition. The results provide theoretical and practical insights into how professionals sustain meaning and ethical integrity amid automation, offering a foundation for future cross-cultural and longitudinal research on human experience in digitally augmented accounting environments.
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