Does artificial intelligence perform managerial control practices in complex settings?

Information Technology (IT) has displayed and continues to display an important role in performing management control practices. The amount of data and information required has steadily grown over time forcing firms to adopt continuously innovative tools and computer techniques. Recent technological advancement has shifted further the attention to an advanced form of Business Analytics, the Artificial Intelligence (AI). This term is referred to the computer simulation processes of human thinking (Li, Zheng, 2018). Computers can learn and perform tasks which were previously considered to require human intelligence. The emphasis on AID translation as a relational and situated accomplishment sheds light on our understanding of the interconnections between accounting technology innovations and the transformation of existing accounting apparatus. How exactly, for example, are managers to make the AI the socio-technical device to change and adapt control practices in-use, facilitate interaction and sense-making among different organizational levels, and support the exploration of radically new accounting and control practices? How do accounting visuals enable certain way of acting for the transformation of the calculative space and legitimate the frame of a radically new space? The paper is structured in two main sections. The first presents a literature review about the evolution of AI solutions in managerial control field by integrating theory and practice perspectives. The second tries to fill the AI literature gap through the analysis of a case study of AI implementation in a large manufacturing Italian company. We draw on a specific managerial control practice, the evaluation of ongoing multi-years contracts, in order to bring out the performative effects of AI on managerial control actions and decisions. Drawing on discussions with managers and software developers, and direct observations drawn from across the functional hierarchy within the organizational unit devoted to perform the evaluation task, we elaborate the ways in which consultants and managers achieve a specific subsets of operational objectives, such as the simplification of control procedures, the interaction among people and the constitution of more specialized cognitive and decision-making processes.