Ethics and Critical Thinking in an AI World
AICPA & CIMA
Last updated September 6, 2026
Ethics and Critical Thinking in an AI World is a self-study ethics course from AICPA & CIMA for finance and accounting professionals who are already putting AI into their working practice. It teaches named ethical frameworks — Kidder’s Nine Checkpoints, alongside utilitarian, rule-based and care-based reasoning — and applies them to cases where professional judgment meets a machine-generated answer, in pricing, forecasting and audit scenarios. Running through it are bias, data reliability and transparency in AI-produced financial outputs, and the question of how professional skepticism holds up when the first draft comes from a model. It is a paid course, taken online.
What you'll learn
- Kidder’s Nine Checkpoints, applied to ethical dilemmas in financial work
- Telling a right-versus-wrong problem from a right-versus-right one
- Utilitarian, rule-based and care-based reasoning, and where each leads
- Bias, data reliability and transparency in AI-generated financial outputs
- Comparing machine-generated audit and financial outputs against human review
- Case studies drawn from pricing, forecasting and audit scenarios
Frequently asked questions about Ethics and Critical Thinking in an AI World
Who is Ethics and Critical Thinking in an AI World for?
CPAs, internal auditors, controllers, finance managers and the ethics and risk officers who set policy for AI-assisted financial work; the course carries US CPE credit in behavioral ethics.
Is Ethics and Critical Thinking in an AI World free?
No — Ethics and Critical Thinking in an AI World is a paid course.
Why we suggest this course
For CPAs, internal auditors, controllers and the risk and ethics officers who set policy, all of whom need more than a general warning about bias. The distinction the course draws between right-versus-wrong and right-versus-right problems is the one that matters in practice, because the hard cases at work are rarely the obvious ones. Named frameworks and worked cases leave a defensible method rather than an instinct.