SYNOPSIS
We investigate the accounting profession’s readiness for ChatGPT through a survey study of 136 practitioners and an interview with two experts. We find that accounting professionals are inexperienced with ChatGPT and use ChatGPT mostly for administrative tasks. However, they plan to use ChatGPT for more value-added tasks in the future. Leveraging a modified technology acceptance model (TAM), we find that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and personal innovativeness are three factors encouraging ChatGPT adoption. However, perceived risk hinders adoption, whereas trust does not impact the adoption. We also find that organizational leaders have a stronger intention to use ChatGPT than lower-level employees. Compared with practitioners from other types of organizations, practitioners from public accounting firms exhibit stronger personal innovativeness toward using ChatGPT but also experience less positive attitude toward ChatGPT. We also provide an “interim scorecard” and other actionable insights that are of interest to both practitioners and academics.
Data Availability: Contact the first author.
JEL Classifications: M40; M41.