KPMG and EY demote partners in end of job-for-life model in UKOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\nAI is \u201ca core area of strategic investment\u201d at the Big Four, said Alex Hamilton-Baily, a partner at executive recruitment firm Odgers. \u201cNo one wants to be left behind. The real challenge is the availability of talent.\u201d<\/p>\n
Audit jobs, which have been in longer-term decline as a share of postings, accounted for just under three per cent of adverts in 2025.<\/p>\n
The findings are based on FT research categorising more than 50,000 public job listings in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, using job ads collected by PredictLeads, a corporate intelligence provider.<\/p>\n
Many of the AI-focused ads were for technical jobs \u2013 such as generative AI engineers and machine learning experts in data science \u2013 the analysis found.<\/p>\n
About four-fifths of these roles required coding skills in 2025, up from three-fifths in 2021. Others focused more on softer skills such as the ability to promote the technology to clients or to help staff at the firms adopt generative AI tools.<\/p>\n
One KPMG job ad called for a manager with experience in chatbot prompt engineering, who could direct AI agents to automate tasks. EY advertised a role in its London office for a senior associate who would help clients \u201cembrace\u201d generative AI in their tax functions. Another at Deloitte required eight years\u2019 experience working on AI strategy in higher education.<\/p>\n
David Autor, a labour economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: \u201cWhat strikes me about that figure is how much AI hiring is going on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some of the roles called for experience of both auditing and AI. These were mostly product managers and developers building AI tools for audit processes.<\/p>\n
It comes as accounting firms look to use AI to better spot patterns in data that can help to identify fraud and look to the technology to reduce the cost of checking companies\u2019 accounts.<\/p>\n
\u201cFive or six years ago many of the big firms started investing very heavily in scaling their technology teams purely focused on supporting the audit service. AI has then accelerated that conversation,\u201d said Ian Pay, head of data analytics and tech at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.<\/p>\n
Despite widespread fears that AI will replace white-collar jobs, especially at junior levels, Pay said accounting skills are still in demand.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we talk about the investments that these big firms are making in AI, a lot of it is actually recruiting people to support its use … In many cases the audit departments are actually still increasing in size but the majority of the additional roles coming in are more technology and AI-focused.\u201d<\/p>\n
One challenge for professional services firms is luring people with in-demand skills away from the tech industry, Hamilton-Baily said.<\/p>\n
PwC\u2019s global chair Mohamed Kande said last year that the company was struggling to hire \u201chundreds and hundreds\u201d of AI engineers. \u201cWe just cannot find them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
One Big Four hiring manager said that hiring for their assurance business, which includes audit, was growing at 6 per cent year-on-year. However, they added: \u201cWe are now embedding AI skills in [all] recruitment processes; so you still need to have these foundational accounting skills … [as well as] the ability to work with new technological platforms.\u201d<\/p>\n
KPMG said: \u201cWe\u2019re increasingly hiring for, and developing, AI fluency across all our people. AI and audit are also not mutually exclusive when it comes to hiring and investment. Trustworthy AI is becoming increasingly vital to the audit process.\u201d<\/p>\n
Deloitte, EY and PwC declined to comment.<\/p>\n
One of the firms cautioned against over-interpreting the results, as a single ad is sometimes posted for multiple positions, meaning that the ratio of hires between audit and AI roles may vary from the ratio of job posts. Some vacancies are also filled through recruiters or by retraining existing staff without external advertisements, it added.<\/p>\n
Methodology<\/p>\n
The FT used an LLM to classify the job title and description for each of 50,000 career adverts posted between January 2020 and January 2026 provided by PredictLeads. Graduate and intern positions were excluded. The FT manually checked a random sample of 500 classifications to ensure accuracy.<\/p>\n
Roles were classified as \u201caudit\u201d if their responsibilities included providing assurance over financial statements. Job postings were excluded if they related to areas such as IT or cyber security audits; audit quality management; or sales and consulting for the audit business.<\/p>\n
Roles were classified as \u201cAI\u201d only when working with technologies such as machine learning, generative AI or related fields (such as computer vision, robotics and natural language processing) was a core job requirement. These included some non-technical roles. \u2013 Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Big Four accounting firms posted more job adverts for AI specialists than auditors last year in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21540,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,10914,18,16242,19,17,1126,2356,82],"class_list":["post-492039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-deloitte","tag-eire","tag-ey","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kpmg","tag-pwc","tag-technology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116600348668742837","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}