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Top1. Introduction
In an era of increasing digitalisation of services, it has become necessary for companies to adapt and change to meet demands, as well as integrate the new emerging technologies in their structure and study their impact across the company. The intense competition that companies face and the challenge of staying differentiated and be competitive in nowadays market has led organizations to start to realize the importance that emerging technologies have for the success of a company. Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data and Internet of things (IoT) are three intelligent systems increasingly used by companies. The integration of this technologies in organizations structures remains to be very relevant because it will impact the way people work, deal with information, and is set to soon invade the businesses world (Quan & Sanderson, 2018).
The impact of these 3 intelligent systems on management accounting is very pertinent to study, as management accountant’s role involves processing huge amounts of information and then communicating it to managers. Then, managers use accounting information to make important decisions. Therefore, study ways to simplify the daily tasks of management accountants will have a big impact in the speed and quality of the decision, which will allow the development and application of effective managerial decisions which will serve as a fundamental prerequisite for a company's competitiveness in the nowadays market (Nicoleta, 2019; Rybicka, 2018; Zahid & Vagif, 2020).
This research has as its main objective to analyse and study the impact of Big Data, AI and IoT on management accounting, by answering to four research questions: (i) How does IoT impact management accounting? (ii) How can Big Data and AI improve management accountants’ processes? (iii) What is the possibility of implementing AI, for decision making, in management accounting? (iv) What will be the shifts in management accounting profession with the massive introduction of intelligent systems into day-to-day tasks?
The structure of this paper is as follow: Section 1 presents the literature review about intelligent systems and management accounting; Section 2 includes the methodology; Section 3 contains the presentation and discussion of the results; and Section 4 presents the final conclusions, limitations, and suggestions for future research.