While staff in tax at EY US will soon be spending more time with their flesh-based colleagues due to a return-to-office mandate that requires them in the office for an average of three days a week, staff in audit across the world will be getting to know the AI the firm is injecting into their tools.
From EY’s press release:
EY launches enterprise-scale agentic AI to redefine the audit experience for the AI era
EY is directly embedding a new multi-agent framework, integrated with Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Fabric, into EY Canvas — the single, global Assurance technology platform that processes more than 1.4 trillion lines of journal entry data per year. Encompassing the daily workflows of 130,000 Assurance professionals across 160,000 audit engagements and more than 150 countries and territories, these capabilities will help audit teams orchestrate complex tasks, processes and technologies, and address risks more dynamically, while accessing continuously updated auditing and accounting guidance — at unprecedented scale and speed.
This overall agentic integration immediately embeds AI in all phases of the audit globally through the EY Canvas platform. This follows a sustained period of extensive and successful testing and piloting. It is expected to support all end-to-end audit activities by 2028.
This all sounds great on paper — or in this case, words on a screen — but what does this mean practically? Answer: no one knows yet. They can’t just set AI loose and put it to work.
Our prediction is that if this does actually result in significant benefit to hours worked at some point that benefit will show in offshore staffing levels (at last count, EY has about 74,000 Global Delivery Services people). They’re the ones most at risk from automation, the people previously at risk (early career grunts) having been replaced already by offshore staff. If firms stop announcing that they’re building large global delivery facilities (see this example from last year: EY Opens Up a New 22,000 Sq Ft Offshore Office in India), then we’ll know the AI is paying off.
Until then, regulators better hurry up and do more than just issue loose guidance about this stuff. And have we figured out how to train up the next generation of managers in this global, tech-forward nightmare future yet?
Big 4 firms are the answer to the question “What happens when you let a bunch of accountants with no creativity, imagination, vision or charisma actually run a real company?”
If it weren’t so destructive to the accounting profession, it would be hilarious watching all the Big 4 firms falling over themselves to appear as leaders in the AI revolution rather than the uninspired followers that they all are. My favorite is the managers and directors who drank the kool-aid and are selling the AI bullshit because they think it will advance their careers, when in fact they are just hastening their own demise. Reminds me of cashiers at the supermarket who encourage customers to use the self check-out.
My fear is that rather than let the accountants run the company, the accountants have started to let the consultants run the company. Lots of vision, lots of creativity, and lots of fancy words as window-dressing for a lack of technical know-how and a detrimental focus on growth over accuracy.
The longer I work in this career, the more I learn to be wary of new tech leveraged in the tax return and/or financial statement prep process.
It’s always one side of the team understands how the tech works but barely understands the tax side and the other side of the team understands the tax/technical side but doesn’t understand the tech. Yes there are unicorns, but the only unicorns I’ve had the pleasure of working with are the ones that don’t understand the tech AND don’t understand the tax side.
AI will ultimately just create an even larger disconnect between the raw data/financials and the ultimate deliverable (tax return or audited financials statements) just like how whole cohorts of staff at the largest accounting firms probably don’t understand their debits/credits.
Pretty soon the visionless and unimaginative Big 4 firms will stop hiring accounting majors and instead bring on computer science and engineering majors to “supervise” the AI doing all the work. What could possibly go wrong at an accounting firm where only the AI (sort of) knows how to do accounting?
Aside from the fact AI is great at hallucinating information, there’s the part where every AI company is actually hemorrhaging money. They are losing on every single prompt. The energy and computing costs are far higher than what they’re being paid. It’s entirely possibly that to achieve profitability they will have to raise prices substantially, which may make the cost of using an AI constantly to be simply more than letting Steve the Associate do the work. We will see what happens, eh?