PwC is training junior accountants to be like managers, because AI is going to be doing the entry-level work

• AI is redefining entry-level jobs.

• In three years, junior accountants will be doing the jobs of managers, PwC AI leader Jenn Kosar said.

• She told Business Insider that the tech is making the firm go “back to basics” in how it trains young accountants.

Think you can do your boss’s job? If you’re a junior accountant, you might soon find out.

New hires at PwC will be doing the roles that managers are doing within three years, because they will be overseeing AI performing routine, repetitive audit tasks, Jenn Kosar, AI assurance leader at PwC, told Business Insider in an interview.

“People are going to walk in the door almost instantaneously becoming reviewers and supervisors,” she said.

PwC, one of the “Big Four” accounting and consulting firms, is deploying AI to take over tasks like data gathering and processing. This is leaving entry-level employees free to focus on “more advanced and value-added work,” Kosar said.

“Three years from now, we will feel like the first years are functioning more like fourth years,” she said. “We will look back and say, ‘Okay, these young people feel more like the managers of my day.'”

Kosar said the technology meant PwC was changing how it trains its junior employees, adding that entry-level workers have to know how to review and supervise the AI’s work.

Where the Big Four firm once focused on teaching young employees to execute audit tasks, it’s now focused on more “back to basics” training and the fundamentals of what an audit should do for a client, she said.

There’s more time in the programming to teach junior employees deeper critical thinking, negotiation, and “professional skepticism,” she said, adding they previously would have been trained in these soft skills later in their careers.

AI is rapidly pushing the industry in new directions. Kosar was a partner in its digital assurances and transparency division before her role as AI assurance lead was created in July 2024. PwC’s “assurance for AI” product, which works with clients on ensuring the AI they use is operated responsibly, has only existed since June.

For all its potential, AI is challenging the Big Four’s long-held business models, organizational structures, and day-to-day roles.

Firms are having to consider outcomes-based pricing models based on results instead of billing clients by the hour.

Alan Paton, a former partner in PwC UK’s financial services division who’s now CEO of a Google Cloud solutions consultancy, previously told Business Insider that automation could increasingly cause clients to question why they should pay consultants big money when they can get answers “instantaneously from a tool.”