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.

This paper provides an assessing review and agenda for research at the ‘nexus’ between information systems and strategy practice. The review aims to understand the nature of this connection between the two areas, where information systems scholars strive to understand the everyday work of practitioners in organisations and the impact of digital technologies in strategizing, whilst strategy practice scholars seek a greater understanding of such technologies and their use by strategists. Despite a developing body of work relevant to both information systems and strategy practice, and several editorials calling for ‘synergy’, we still collectively know little about the state of knowledge at the nexus. To address this, our review identifies several constructs that provide linkages between information systems and strategy practice to reveal more about the current state of knowledge and to develop a formal definition for a domain which we call digital strategizing. We conclude by outlining an agenda to encourage and accelerate future research on digital strategizing.