Accounting used to be a career. It was long hours, but the promise of a six-figure salary, healthy benefits, and ownership in a firm. It was boring, but historically, it was a reliable ladder to the upper-middle class for those who sought its refuge.
The Ghost of Accounting Past is still coasting on this reputation, but arguably, undeservingly.
For years, the accounting field has seen diminished interest among young people due to education and exam demands, as well as long workweeks.
The promise of a six-figure salary has simply not been attractive enough to justify these pursuits, especially amid worries about the future of knowledge work.
But the Ghost of Accounting Future would like a word.
In the next 15 years, 75% of current Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) are slated to retire. And at this rate, nobody is coming to replace them. Instead, the industry is mortgaging its firms on a bet that AI is the only way forward.
Whether they’re right or wrong, it’s likely a race to the bottom.
Most white-collar professions have faced a downturn after the pandemic, due in large part to overhiring during the pandemic’s combination of stimulus and zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP). At the same time, so-called “knowledge work” leaders are pressuring employees to focus on “efficiency.”
The Big Four are no different. Despite already saddling employees with legal, unpaid overtime, many firms are cutting staff to the bone and hoping to fill in the gaps with purpose-built artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
In this way, accounting firms are starting to resemble technology firms; they used to be seen as prestigious employers, but a lack of stability and diminishing benefits call that into question.
The number of junior positions has been drying up as firms push into AI, a trend that is observable across white-collar fields. In accounting specifically, new grad hiring fell by up to 29% in recent years.
No more are the days when a firm would hire you if you had the required education, then train you. Hiring is more rigorous, and expectations exist from day one.
This week, KPMG announced it would lay off 10% of its U.S. audit partners after failing to secure enough voluntary retirements. It credited new AI audit tools, which introduced redundancy in managers. Last month, the firm cut jobs in the U.K. after “unusually low attrition.”
It’s not alone. Over the last year, all of the Big Four firms have conducted job cuts. In EY’s case, the company has offshored large numbers of support roles for “cost management.” This goes against the “recession-proof” reputation that many accounting firms earned in the past.
As if layoffs are not already morale-destroying enough, some firms are cutting back on benefits, too. This week, Deloitte announced that it would cut back benefits for various employees:
Paid Time Off (PTO) is being cut for most employees by between 5 and 10 days.
The firm is freezing its Pension Plan and plans no new accruals after 2026.
Paid Family Leave was cut in half to 8 weeks.
The firm stopped offering a $50,000 Family Planning benefit to cover IVF, adoption, or surrogacy costs.
Candidly, none of the changes suggests that the company values employees. It also doesn’t do a great job of making the industry an attractive destination for new talent.
Tech firms are highly profitable and have billions to spend on compute. Accounting firms are not the same. That’s one reason why labor-intensive businesses are rolling back investments in talent and focusing more on artificial intelligence (AI).
Some of these early investments have been promising, especially on the audit front. Over the last few years, the Big Four firms have spent no less than $9 billion on internal AI development and partnerships.
Deloitte has launched an internal “AI academy” and begun toying with agents for certain tasks.
KPMG partnered with Microsoft to integrate Azure, OpenAI, and Copilot across the firm.
PwC partnered with OpenAI and became one of their largest enterprise customers in short order.
EY is playing with an AI audit system.
Of course, AI integration is heavily dependent on talent. You have to have talent to build the tools and use them. Many of the new AI-powered tools are new to the business, too, helping to facilitate internal tax, audit, or advisory processes.
Still, it’s important to have humans on hand, as big mistakes are not generally a luxury afforded to these sorts of businesses. You ultimately need competent human beings who can identify problems with technology, especially when it tends to hallucinate.
There is another object to integration, though: the scale of the businesses. Candidly, this is a slippery slope.
Invest all they want, they might be no match for a faster, leaner organization, especially if cost becomes a factor. It’s not to say the firms are going anywhere anytime soon; they still represent the gold standard for financial reporting among publicly traded companies.
However, there’s a world where that changes, especially considering how labor-intensive and bureaucratic the Big Four are. Ironically, they’re playing a huge role in the accelerating the diminishment of the entire accounting field, financially speaking.
Earlier this year, KPMG threatened to drop its own auditor if it didn’t pass along savings from its use of AI tools. It successfully pestered Grant Thornton to give it a 14% discount on those services.
If KPMG assumed that it would be the only firm to do such a thing, they are sorely mistaken. If their auditor isn’t special, then it stands to reason they aren’t either. That’s a slippery slope for firms. It’s also completely self-inflicted, because everybody knows that the Big Four is using AI.
Firms now know to ask for a discount because of the use of the tools, which means firms will be in the precarious position of trying to diversify their existing revenue with new, purpose-built tools.
And if they’re wrong, they will still be labor-intensive organizations, agreeing to make less money, even if their capital investments in technology work out.
Instead of enriching or complimenting existing work, it is possible that these moves just turn the field into a race to the bottom.
Perhaps the problem is not as fraught in corporate accounting, where salaries and work-life balance are increasingly attractive to prospective employees. The gravity of talent is moving toward these more attractive jobs.
That’s a problem for public accounting, though. It’s a problem that affects all of us, too. There are a finite number of quality accountants out there, and computers still can’t do everything alone.
It might be tempting to dream of a world where accounting is largely handled by computers, but oversight will still be needed. Candidly, technology could augment the capabilities of existing talent, but tools are only as good as the wielder.
Big Four firms publish annual reports to assess the scale of errors they missed. During the pandemic, firms had record errors. These have declined in recent years, but they still affect up to a fifth of audits.
Technology could help with some of this, but it surely won’t fix these problems. Why? Well, because candidly, most of the errors couldn’t be solved by an AI agent alone. The primary misses have been revenue recognition (nearly a third of errors), internal controls (over half of deficiencies), and other factors.
This problem has, no doubt, been exacerbated by the global shortage of accounting talent from top-to-bottom. It’s a problem that is getting worse, with no sign of improvement.
Truthfully, it’s unlikely to get much better absent higher salaries and better benefits. Or, most controversially, a relaxing of education requirements for accounting jobs — which is sure to be a slap in the face to many career accountants who worked hard for their credit hours and those three letters behind their name.
This story was originally published by TheStreet on Apr 24, 2026, where it first appeared in the Markets section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
