**1. Introduction**

In a world where every facet can be digitally enabled through emerging technologies, enterprises in all industries will need to adapt to keeping pace and prosper or will ultimately risk unplanned obsoletion [1]. Advances in emerging technologies have the potential to impact and disrupt the audit industry, most notably in big data analytics [2–5], artificial intelligence (AI) [6, 7] and blockchain technology [3, 8, 9]. Audit firms cannot simply be familiar with emerging technologies any longer [10], as these principles and concepts have the potential to integrate with their existing processes and skills or replace them [11, 12]. As manual labor was replaced by machines during the industrial revolution [13, 14], from big data [15, 16], audit procedures can be codified in machine learning (ML) algorithms [3, 17], and ultimately the use of AI for cognitive tasks [7, 18], such as audit opinions and judgments. The introduction and use of blockchain

technologies in financial services, specifically accounting, has led to the rise of tripleentry accounting that would negate the need for transaction level auditing [19, 20].

These technological advances can be regarded as disruptors to the audit industry, or they can be harnessed by audit firms and used as opportunities [7]. Opportunities that can change the audit industry, the audit profession, and the role of the auditor [3] to better assure stakeholders while increasing profitability and maintaining or creating a competitive advantage in the marketplace [21]. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify the impacts of digitalization on the audit industry and was guided by the research question "*What is the impact of digitalization on the audit industry considering the new advances in technology, specifically focusing on big data analytics, AI, and blockchain technology*?" The impacts identified were themed and tested in the South African financial services industry to uncover how these impacts have materialized in the market. Furthermore, to gain insights on the lived experiences of the changes to the audit process, audit profession and the skills required by auditors. Organizations can use the results of this study to plan and prioritize their digitalization strategies and programmes and obtain a view of the skills required by auditors in a digitalized audit environment.

The rest of the chapter is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the background to the study and the research methodology is presented in Section 3. Section 4 describes the data analysis and findings and Section 5 the contribution. Section 6 concludes the chapter.
