Auditor Professional Identity in the Age of AI:Navigating Psychological Tensions and Normalization Approaches

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is steadily transforming the audit field. The benefits that AI may bring to the profession, such as improved quality, increased efficiency, and reduced human errors, have been widely acknowledged. At the same time, less attention has been paid to AI’s effect on auditors from a “human-centric” perspective, particularly in terms of their work experience and identity. This study examines<br/>whether and how auditors experience the psychological tensions brought about by AI and how AI introduction affects their sense of their professional role. We further explore what “normalization” approaches auditors apply to integrate AI into their work routines. Normalization refers to the auditors’<br/>efforts by which AI becomes a taken-for-granted component of their work and a natural part of existing, socially patterned knowledge and routines.<br/>We conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with auditors, audit partners, and innovation specialists from Big Four and mid-sized audit firms in The Netherlands. In these conversations we discussed how participants experience the introduction of AI, how they integrate AI in their work routines, and how it impacts their professional identity, skepticism, and decision-making. The findings suggest that AI brings<br/>a mix of positive experiences and psychological tensions. The positive experiences include enhanced audit effectiveness and efficiency, and a sense of improved work-life balance stemming from these enhancements. At the same time, auditors report that they are experiencing psychological tensions. These tensions are brought about by incoherences between auditors’ professional self-conception as critical,<br/>skeptical, independent decision-makers, and the opacity of AI that prevents its outputs from being critically scrutinized.<br/>The findings further show that these tensions give rise to two major approaches through which auditors normalize AI. On the one hand, auditors frame AI as a benevolent technology by selectively focusing on specific attributes of AI that align with their current professional identity and, on the other hand, auditors start to alter or “drift” their professional identity by reinterpreting what it means to be an auditor<br/>in the age of AI. We propose that these normalization approaches help to understand how auditors perceive their professional role and the place of AI in it, and whether and how this perception affects their behavior.