EY's new AI agents will make life harder for entry-level accountants at first, a top exec says

• EY has launched an agentic AI solution for its assurance division.
• The tool will change what the firm wants from its junior staff, EY's Marc Jeschonneck told Business Insider.
• It will initially make things more difficult for some staff, before getting much easier, he said.

Ask almost any auditor how they learned the job, and you'll hear the same answer: repetition.

Ask them how AI is reshaping the industry, and the answer is just as consistent: it's taking away repetitive work.

EY, a leading accounting and consulting firm, is facing up to that paradox with a new training approach for junior workers as it revamps its audit workflow with AI agents.

On Tuesday, the Big Four firm launched a global multi-agent framework embedded in EY Canvas, its assurance platform, which will be used by its 130,000 auditors daily.

The goal is to have 100% of audit activities supported by agents by 2028, Marc Jeschonneck, EY's global assurance transformation leader, told Business Insider.

The system is designed to make audit work more efficient and embed AI in processes more seamlessly than a chatbot does.

Assurance teams will quickly realize "how much easier their life is," said Jeschonneck, but it may make things more challenging for entry-level staff in the short-term.

Auditors will "need to have quite a level of experience" to effectively review what the reconciliation agents produce, Jeschonneck said.

"For our youngest people, that means that their entry point here is potentially not that much easier right away."

To help bring them up to par, EY plans to begin training them in a "very different way."

Instead of learning on the job and repeating the same task across multiple engagements, new hires will work through realistic audit scenarios, supported by adaptive learning tools and short videos embedded in the platform itself.

Jeschonneck said the shift is ultimately a positive for entry-level workers, even if the transition is hard.

Skilled people coming out of university don't want to spend time on administrative tasks, and they "don't need to do certain things a thousand or 10,000 times before they finally understand how it works."

How many AI agents are enough?

Under the hood, EY's global multi-agent framework is built on a relatively small set of agents.

The initial launch includes a core assistant alongside three other agents for searching and summarizing documentation and automating administrative tasks. They have around 20 core modular capabilities, but that number multiplies depending on what data you expose to it and how you combine different capabilities, said Jeschonneck.

Two additional agents are set to roll out soon: one that will review auditors' work papers and suggest improvements, and another focused on reconciliation documentation — matching invoices and other records to audit samples.

The main impact is that AI capabilities are no longer fragmented, said Jeschonneck. Unlike Copilot, which requires users to upload files themselves, EY's agentic AI system acts as a "one-stop shop."

The question of agent headcounts has split the professional services world after McKinsey's CEO Bob Sternfels said in January that his consulting firm now has 25,000 agent employees.

Measuring the number of agents isn't the key to success, said Jeschonneck.

"We don't believe that that is a good measure. If somebody builds thousands of agents, they probably have not understood how it works," he said.

'Nobody should be worried'

Integrating AI agents into audit and consulting is part and parcel of the Big Four's business model in 2026. They win work if they can prove the value of enterprise-scale AI, and who better to demonstrate on than their own workforce?

This month, KPMG told Business Insider that it is piloting a program that has tax professionals using vibe coding to automate tax and compliance processes.

But as industry leaders invest billions in AI, their employees' business, finance, and consulting jobs are routinely listed among the professions most exposed to AI.

Hiring for certain job roles, like management consultants, is down, and EY's fellow Big Four firm PwC has cut all entry-level recruitment in the US by a third over the next three years, Business Insider exclusively reported in August.

Jeschonneck said EY isn't planning to drop hiring.

"Yes, the number of people required for the legacy historical financial statement audit, to go through those historic requirements, that will probably go down," he said.

But EY's "goal here is to keep the same number of people," he said.

The firm expects to need more capacity to handle the technology side and increasingly complex client and regulatory demands.

"Nobody should be worried about an immediate career joining the accounting world," Jeschonneck said. "We'll need the people with the institutional knowledge, of more than a hundred years being in accounting, making the technology relevant."