KPMG Cut Four Hundred Assistant Managers. Amy Decided to Become the Auditor Who Works Best with AI
A text-based reconciliation used to take Amy three days; Excel couldn’t handle it, so someone had to check it line by line. This year the job went to the company’s Copilot: ten minutes to finish, plus an hour of her review. KPMG next door cut four hundred assistant managers this year, and senior leadership said in a meeting that by 2030 all workpapers and testing will be done by AI, with junior staff becoming AI operators. Amy doesn’t think this is all bad news: feeling the pressure is a good thing; what’s truly bad is a company that isn’t using AI at all, leaving you to repeat the same work day after day. Her advice to herself: stay at the table, and become the employee in audit and compliance who collaborates with AI best.
A text-based reconciliation used to take Amy three days. Excel couldn’t handle it; someone had to check it line by line. This year, the job went to the company’s Copilot. It finished in ten minutes, and Amy spent another hour reviewing the result.
Amy did her master’s in international business and joined the Big Four as an auditor after graduation. She chose this line of work because the bar to entry was a bit lower, and the industry sponsors a lot of work visas.
Now her day is full of Copilot. In meetings, it writes summaries and helps divide up the work; when she trains new hires, it produces the guidance materials; it connects to the company’s Microsoft Office, runs text comparison checks, and reads and writes emails for her. It helps with archiving too. Audit evidence is scattered across client systems, the firm’s systems, and back-and-forth emails. Sometimes a person still has to email someone to ask for it, but once it comes back, the tagging, filing, and formatting can all be handed over.
“This year’s Copilot is a lot smarter than last year’s. The work it couldn’t do before, it can do now,” Amy said.
Auditing is in a wave of layoffs. KPMG next door cut four hundred assistant managers this year. A lot of the testing work was packaged off to the India team to cut costs and raise efficiency. In past years, someone on the team would always jump to a client-side job; this year, almost no one has. With turnover this low, competition for promotion keeps getting fiercer.
Senior leadership said in a meeting: by 2030, all workpaper and testing work will be done by AI. “Our junior staff will become AI operators.”
Amy doesn’t think this is all bad news. Feeling the pressure is a good thing, she says; you get to learn AI alongside the company and grow together with it. What’s truly bad is a company that isn’t using AI at all, leaving you to do the same repetitive work day after day. That is what having no progress looks like.
The way she sees it, the same goes for firms: “Audit firms that use AI will eliminate the ones that don’t. If employees won’t use AI, or the AI workflow is chaotic and the collaboration with AI is rough, audit quality suffers, and eventually you lose the client. Companies in the future will compete on whose organizational structure with AI is more mature and more efficient. That is who wins.”
Her advice to herself: do everything she can to stay at the table and not get cut, then use the company’s environment to become the employee in audit and compliance who collaborates with AI best.
I asked her: in the AI era, what is your unique value in this auditing job?
Amy said: “The connection between people, and the collaboration between people and AI.”