Artificial intelligence and its impact on the legitimacy of audit firms : A qualitative study of how the legitimacy of audit firms will be influenced by artificial intelligence

Legitimacy is about meeting society's expectations and as we live in a society that is constantly changing, the perception of what is legitimate or not is also changing. The main purpose of an auditor in today's society is to review financial reports and guarantee their quality. In recent years, technological developments have changed the profession of auditors and previous research shows that digitalization has made it easier for the auditors as certain parts of the audit process have been automated. The purpose of the study was to examine how AI in audit firms will affect the legitimacy of auditors. The focus has been on the audit companies' working process and how the process is going to change with the help of AI, and finally how the auditors believe this will affect the legitimacy of the audit companies. Qualitative interviews have been used on auditors, to be able to get into the depth and obtain personal thoughts from the respondents. The results of the study show that the introduction of AI will have a positive impact on the audit process since it is assumed that standardized and time-consuming tasks will be automated. Furthermore, this means that auditors will be able to perform more accurate analyzes and get more time over to the customers, which means that the audit companies are assumed to be able to increase their legitimacy. Therefore, the conclusion is that AI will help audit companies with their legitimacy in the future