You chose accounting because it felt safe. Now the software does the work that trained you, and the first rung of the ladder feels shaky.
This in-depth guide covers everything you need to know about will ai replace accountants? what the evidence shows. Based on verified income data and real-world case studies from our database of 138 side hustle tactics.
AI will not replace accountants as a whole in the next few years, and the official forecast still has accountant jobs growing. What it is replacing, right now, is the routine work that used to train new accountants: categorising transactions, reconciliations, first-pass audit testing and the simpler tax returns. If you are a bookkeeper, a clerk or a graduate trying to get your first audit job, the squeeze is already here.
The ledger you thought would always need you
You picked accounting because it felt safe. Your parents said so. Every business needs someone to keep the books, file the taxes and sign off the numbers, and nobody was going to automate trust. You sat the exams, or you are halfway through them, and you have a loan that assumed a steady salary on the other side.
Then you watched your firm roll out a new tool. It matched the bank feed to the ledger overnight. It flagged the odd journal entries you used to hunt for by hand. Your manager said it would "free you up for higher-value work," and you nodded, and on the drive home you did the sum. If the machine does the first two years of the job, who pays for your first two years?
What AI already does in accounting
Start with the software small businesses already pay for. In June 2025 Intuit put a set of AI agents into QuickBooks Online, rolling out to US customers from July 1. Its Accounting Agent automates bookkeeping and transaction categorisation and "assists in reconciliation," and Intuit says its agents together can save a business "up to 12 hours a month." That is Intuit's own claim, with no published method, but twelve hours a month is a big slice of what a part-time bookkeeper bills a small client.
Then there are tools built for accounting firms themselves. Basis, a New York startup founded in 2023, raised $100 million at a $1.15 billion valuation in February 2026. Its agents prepare tax returns, perform audit testing, generate workpapers and handle reconciliation, with humans reviewing and approving the output. The company says about 30% of the Top 25 US accounting firms are deploying its agents for end-to-end workflows. A billion-dollar price on accounting software is a bet on the labour it can stand in for.
The Big Four have moved from pilots into production. ACCA's AB magazine reported in August 2026 that EY handed part of the work on its audit platform to AI agents in April 2026. The agents sit inside EY Canvas, used on about 160,000 audits a year, and are expected to support all end-to-end audit activities by 2028. Today they assign tasks, raise review notes, start client requests and answer engagement questions with source references. Evidence-gathering and workpaper agents are due later in 2026. The same report says KPMG has built agents into its Clara audit platform, Deloitte launched its agentic platform Zora in 2025, and PwC says an end-to-end, AI-integrated audit process will be in place for calendar 2026 audits.
Look at the words the firms use. EY's Paul Goodhew, its global assurance innovation and digital leader, calls the model "human-led, agent-operated." KPMG's Sebastian Stöckle, global head of innovation and AI for audit, said: "The auditor's role is moving from execution to steering, review and critical assessment."
Execution is the part of the job that juniors do.
The research says it works, and that seniors gain most
The best field evidence so far comes from Jung Ho Choi of Stanford and Chloe Xie of MIT. They studied a survey of 277 accountants and hundreds of thousands of transaction entries from 79 small and midsize firms using one AI accounting platform. MIT Sloan's August 2025 summary reports that AI users shifted about 8.5% of their time from routine data entry to higher-value tasks, cut the monthly close by 7.5 days and recorded their books in 12% finer detail.
Two lines from that research matter for your career. The authors found that more experienced accountants used the AI system more strategically. They also saw that "When AI suggests diverging categories for uncertain transactions, accountants tend to still follow AI's suggestions." Xie summed up the split this way: "In accounting, there's laundry and there's poetry."
The laundry is going to the machine. The poetry stays with people who already have years of judgment. The gap between the two is where a new graduate used to learn.
So here is the first question to sit with: if the tasks that taught you the job are automated, where do you get the experience that the remaining jobs ask for?
Who is already losing hours or entry-level roles
The firms that train most new accountants have cut the number they take in.
In the UK, The Telegraph reported in June 2025, as relayed by Scottish Financial News, that KPMG cut its graduate intake by 29%, from 1,399 to 942. Deloitte's intake fell 18%, from 1,700 to 1,400. EY's fell 11%, from 1,800 to 1,600, and PwC's fell 6%, from 1,600 to 1,500. Indeed data in the same report showed UK accountancy graduate job adverts down 44% in 2025 compared with 2023, against a 33% fall for all graduate jobs.
PwC UK went down again the next year, to 1,300 entry-level hires from 1,500. UK chief Marco Amitrano blamed the economy first, but he also wrote: "AI is reshaping roles, global markets remain volatile, and graduate intakes everywhere are under pressure." And: "For now, the development of new tools and the parallel investment in skills are offsetting more serious disruption." Read "for now" twice.
In the US, Business Insider obtained an internal PwC presentation in August 2025 showing plans to cut graduate hiring by "a third" over three years. One slide listed the reasons as "transformation efforts, the impact of AI, and further AC integration." AC means PwC's acceleration centres, its offshore delivery hubs.
That one bullet point holds the whole problem. AI and offshoring work together. Software takes the most routine tasks, and the next layer of standardised work moves to a cheaper hub. What is left onshore is review and client contact, which needs fewer people, and they need to be more senior.
The ACCA report spells out who feels this most. The data-heavy tasks that traditionally trained junior staff, such as reconciliations, document review and population analysis, are where AI is adopted first, and juniors will increasingly review machine-generated findings instead of performing the procedures. Marc Welters, who chairs the Dutch IT auditors' body Norea, told the magazine the steepest learning curve belongs to junior staff.
The wider labour data points the same way. Stanford economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen, in a paper revised in August 2026, found that employment of workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations is 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with less-exposed peers. Their work covers the whole economy, but desk-based, rules-heavy work like bookkeeping sits squarely in the exposed group.
For a family budget, the difference is stark. A clerk earning the BLS median of $50,670 has little room for a few lost months. A graduate who spent five years and a master's degree on the CPA route, and then waits a year longer than planned for a training contract, loses a year of salary and a year of the experience that every later job will ask about. That cost does not show up in any projection table, and it lands on you, your rent and whoever you hoped to help with your first pay cheques.
Second question: if you are a bookkeeper billing by the hour, what happens to your income when your client's software claims to save them twelve hours a month?
The pipeline was already thinning
The profession had a supply problem before AI arrived, and the two now feed each other.
The AICPA's October 2025 Trends report, summarised in the Journal of Accountancy, counted 55,152 accounting bachelor's and master's degrees in the 2023 to 2024 academic year, down 6.6% from the year before, after a 9.6% fall the year before that. Master's degrees fell about 15%.
New CPA exam candidates dropped from 42,626 in 2023 to 28,082 in 2024, which the AICPA tied to the first year of the new exam model. The early 2025 count was firmer, with 16,448 new candidates in the first six months.
There is a recovery story in the same report. Spring 2025 enrollment in US accounting programmes rose 12.4% to 266,506, the highest since 2020, and 75% of responding firms expected to hire at least as many new graduates in 2025 as in 2024. The AICPA's academic-in-residence Jan Taylor said "it's encouraging the rate of decline has slowed year over year."
Think about what this means if you are one of those 28,082 candidates. You chose the exam on the promise of a shortage, so a firm would have to fight for you. You may now find that the shortage is real at manager level and thin at entry level, which is the one level you can apply for.
Put the two trends side by side. Firms complain they cannot find enough accountants, and the same firms cut graduate intakes. Both can be true when the work that needs fewer, more experienced people stays onshore and the starter work goes to software and offshore hubs. A thinner pipeline gives firms another reason to automate. More automation gives students another reason to pick a different degree.
What the official forecasts say
Here are the numbers, with sources.
| Measure | Figure | Source |
|---|
| US accountants and auditors, jobs in 2025 | 1,595,200 | BLS |
| Projected change, accountants and auditors, 2025 to 2035 | +5% (+79,400 jobs) | BLS |
| Median pay, accountants and auditors, May 2025 | $83,680 | BLS |
| US bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks, jobs in 2025 | 1,532,400 | BLS |
| Projected change, clerks, 2025 to 2035 | -6% (-85,600 jobs) | BLS |
| Median pay, clerks, May 2025 | $50,670 | BLS |
| Accounting degrees awarded, 2023 to 2024 | 55,152 (-6.6%) | AICPA via JofA |
| New CPA exam candidates, 2023 vs 2024 | 42,626 vs 28,082 | AICPA via JofA |
| KPMG UK graduate intake | 1,399 to 942 (-29%) | Scottish Financial News |
| UK accountancy graduate job adverts, 2025 vs 2023 | -44% | Scottish Financial News |
| PwC US planned graduate hiring cut | about a third over three years | Business Insider via Yahoo Finance |
| Accountant time moved off data entry with AI | about 8.5% | MIT Sloan |
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is blunt about clerks. Its handbook says "Technological change is expected to reduce demand for these workers" and that "Software innovations have automated many of the tasks performed by bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks." There will still be about 144,100 openings a year for clerks, all of them from replacing people who leave. The total number of seats shrinks.
For accountants and auditors, the BLS projects growth faster than average, with about 115,300 openings a year. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 put "accounting, bookkeeping and payroll clerks" on its list of the fastest-declining roles, alongside data entry clerks and bank tellers. The IMF estimated in January 2024 that almost 40% of global employment is exposed to AI, with higher exposure in advanced economies.
Where the forecasts disagree
The disagreement is mostly about timing and who it lands on.
The BLS projection is built on past patterns and was finished before agent-based audit tools were in production at EY. A 5% growth figure for accountants can be right in total and still hide a sharp shift inside it: more senior reviewers and advisers, fewer people doing first-year work. A growing occupation can be a harder one to enter.
The firms themselves send mixed signals. Thomson Reuters' June 2025 survey of 2,275 professionals found respondents expected AI to save them five hours a week within a year, worth an estimated $12 billion a year for US CPA firms. A firm can spend those hours on new advisory work or bank them by hiring fewer people. Partners decide which, and partner pay depends on it.
The honest counter-evidence is real. US accounting enrollment rose in 2025, three quarters of responding firms planned to hold or raise graduate hiring, and the MIT and Stanford study found AI users handling more client work with better books. Accountants who know the tools are getting more done.
Third question: when your firm says AI will free you for advisory work, has anyone shown you what that job looks like, how many of them there are, and what experience it requires?
What this means for you this month
If you are a bookkeeper or clerk, treat the BLS line about software as a forecast for your income. Raise your rates for review and clean-up work, which AI output still needs, and drop the pure data entry before your clients drop it for you. If your clients already run QuickBooks agents, offer to set them up and check their work each month. Sold to several clients, that is a small AI automation agency.
If you are a student or a new graduate, pick the employers who still train people properly, and ask in interviews how their juniors spend their first year. Learn the audit and tax tools your target firms use well enough to check their output. That checking job is what the firms are hiring for.
If you are mid-career and worried, get your numbers straight first. Work out how much money you need before you quit your job, and read our guide to a career change at 40 if a move is on your mind. If you can explain numbers to non-accountants, online tutoring for accounting students is a side income you can start this month.
For the wider picture across professions, see which jobs AI will replace and our sibling post on whether AI will replace financial advisors.