Small Firm Blazes Trail in Artificial Intelligence Use for Audits

When Samantha Bowling first started serving on the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants' council, she noticed a frequent conversation topic: artificial intelligence. In a 2018 Burrus Research-Maryland Association of CPAs survey of more than 1,000 CPAs, respondents ranked AI, machine learning, and cognitive computing as the top technology trends that will influence the accounting and finance world over the next three years. AI is a collective term for computers that can simulate human behaviors, like decision making and learning. As a council member, Bowling saw that Big Four accounting firms were funneling cash into the technology, threatening to crush her 15-person CPA firm's audit practice. "I decided I was going to take out my Google machine last fall and say, 'there's got to be a solution for AI for small firms,'" Bowling told Bloomberg Tax in an interview.