Harnessing the potential of artificial intelligence: affordances, constraints, and strategic implications for professional services

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to transform business models and enable novel service propositions, it also ushers in intricate managerial challenges. To comprehend AI’s disruption as well as harness its potential, we conducted a developmental review of 92 scholarly works centred on financial auditing, the chosen professional service domain. Drawing on the corpus of literature, we applied the Technology Affordance and Constraints Theory (TACT) to dissect the opportunities and challenges that AI introduces to professional services. Our analysis led to conceptualising AI’s affordances and constraints for individual practitioners, firms, and professional associations within the auditing domain. Subsequently, we compared these with the affordances and constraints of typical non-AI, classic IT tools in the same domain, highlighting the disruptive essence of AI. Our findings further revealed the reciprocal and tensional relationship between AI affordances and constraints, where actualising AI affordance at the firm level may impose constraints on individual practitioners. Based on our findings, we argue for integrating AI into decision-making by practitioners, propose a dynamic view of task automation and augmentation for firms, and urge an AI-calibrated knowledge system for professional associations. This study contributes to both theory and practice, laying the foundation for a more nuanced discourse on the strategic significance of harnessing AI in professional services.