Abstract

Blockchain and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) are more and more seen as instruments that have the potential to change the way financial information is created, validated, and used. There is, however, little evidence regarding how the professionals and investors who depend on this information view these technologies. This paper presents a survey of 500 respondents-sell-side analysts, buy-side analysts and portfolio managers, credit-rating analysts, individual investors, and other market participants-to probe perceived decision-usefulness, perceived risk, and trust/reliance with respect to blockchain- and GenAI-enabled financial information. Respondents indicated strong familiarity with blockchain (85.0% at least somewhat familiar) and substantial usage of generative AI (67.0%), primarily for research summarization and analysis of financial statements. Decision-usefulness (M = 4.27) and trust/reliance (M = 4.19) were rated consistently higher than perceived risk (M = 3.83) on a five-point scale; risk items showed greater dispersion across respondents than usefulness or trust items. Responses to open-ended questions revealed that transparency is the most important perceived benefit while AI hallucinations/errors are considered the biggest worry; concerns about data integrity at source entry follow closely behind these two issues in importance. These results imply that barriers to adoption focus more on output reliability and upstream data quality than on the basic technological premise itself. This study provides survey-based evidence for a nascent literature on GenAI and blockchain adoption in financial reporting with implications for regulators, technology vendors, and reporting entities who wish to instill justified trust in such tools.

Keywords: Blockchain, Generative AI, Financial Reporting, Decision-Usefulness, Perceived Risk, Trust, Technology Acceptance