Designing an AI Maturity Model for Strategic Management Accounting: A Meta-Synthesis Approach

The rapid evolution of smart technologies has driven strategic management accounting (SMA) toward fundamental transformation, yet the lack of an integrated framework creates a theoretical and practical gap. This study designs a comprehensive AI maturity model in SMA to map organizations' evolutionary path to full strategic integration. Adopting a qualitative approach, it utilizes meta-synthesis to analyze 23 articles systematically, with screening following the PRISMA 2020 protocol and quality assessed via the CASP tool. Reliability was ensured through Cohen's kappa coefficient and the intraclass correlation coefficient with six experts. Three-stage thematic synthesis revealed three themes: critical success factors across technical (data quality, cloud infrastructure), organizational (management support, AI governance), and hybrid intelligence (digital literacy, algorithmic explainability) layers; implementation barriers at technical (legacy system inertia), economic-organizational (costs, structural resistance), and human-ethical (black-box challenge, algorithmic bias) levels; and organizational consequences from operational automation to strategic role transformation. These themes form a dynamic five-level maturity model depicting the two-way interaction of drivers and barriers at each stage. The primary innovation is bridging the theoretical gap through an integrated socio-technical framework that simultaneously combines success factors, barriers, and consequences in SMA, unlike previous unidimensional models. Conceptualizing hybrid intelligence and the resulting "hybrid accountant" as the ultimate maturity outcome provides a practical roadmap for the profession and a foundation for future research.