Entry-level finance workers have long taken on the most basic tasks, like processing transactions and data.
Those same rote, repetitive tasks have become a prime focus for automation using artificial intelligence (AI) — and it’s already driving substantial changes in the workplace environment, jobs market, and career paths for early-career professionals.
The Big Four accounting firms reportedly reduced their entry-level hiring by 44% from 2023 to 2025 — likely due to economic changes and the proliferation of generative AI. Stanford University researchers have found that in AI-exposed occupations hiring of early-career workers has declined 16% compared to more experienced workers.
“The composition of the finance function as a whole, we do believe, will change,” said Peter Nagy, vice president for Gartner, specialising in finance functional strategy and organisational design.
That change raises big questions for future management accountants, who face a tough job market and shifting career expectations.
“AI seems capable of the [foundational] type of work usually undertaken by an entry-level finance professional, which could displace our workload,” said Tim Mickleburgh, ACMA, CGMA, who was recognised as CIMA’s Student of the Year in 2025.
“I think that the experience and knowledge that we acquire from undertaking [such] work early on in our finance careers [are] essential for our development into talented senior professionals, so I wonder if that will hinder the leaders of the future.”
So, what can managers, leaders, and new entrants do to prepare for this new reality? Financial Management asked finance experts, academics, and others from around the world.
They described a fast-changing world for new entrants — but one with new opportunities, too.
How early-career finance jobs are changing
“AI can be beneficial for young professionals because it allows them to automate or delegate routine tasks and focus more on higher-value activities,” said Nisha Nair, ACMA, CGMA, an internal audit specialist in the public sector in the Middle East.
“But on the contrary, reliance on AI has also taken away some of the safe training ground young professionals once had,” she said. “They are now expected to develop higher-order skills much earlier in their careers, often before they have had the opportunity to build foundational experience.” (See also the sidebar, “Starting a Finance Career in the Hybrid Workplace and Beyond”.)
The technology solutions integrator company Insight Enterprises is in the midst of its own digital transformation — one that Chief Accounting Officer Rachael Crump, CPA/CITP, CGMA, expects will fundamentally change the roles of graduate hires.
“The entry level is starting to move toward the exception processing instead of the transaction processing,” she said. In other words, their focus will be on investigating errors and outliers that automated systems couldn’t resolve on their own.
Iryna Bilous, ACMA, CGMA, head of finance–Finance & M&A IT for Novartis in Czechia, agreed — noting that the change began with earlier automation efforts, not just AI.
“Routine transactional work is shrinking, especially in more mature environments,” she said. “Entry-level hires are increasingly expected to work with exceptions, controls, data analytics, and business-facing problem-solving rather than only basic processing.”
Jonathan Fernando is seeing a similar change in his role as a supply chain manager in Saudi Arabia for a leading international gourmet food company.
“Moving from data collection, these types of roles will be about organising and providing decision-support assistance,” he said. He also expects roles to be consolidated: Instead of just working in planning, an early-career hire might also assist with procurement.
Nair thinks that, in the near future, entry-level professionals will increasingly be expected to co-ordinate and validate the work of AI agents, whom she compares to “super interns” because of their remarkable capabilities but whose outputs still require human judgement and oversight.
“The entry-level professionals are expected to take on the role of supervising these super interns,” she said. “That means critically evaluating their output: Does it make sense? Are there any biases, inaccuracies, or gaps? What might be missing from the analysis?”
Nagy and other experts, including Crump, expect that automation will eventually change the shape of organisations — with their greatest concentration of workers being mid-career.
“We do think there’s a smaller entry level,” Nagy said. At the same time, he added, “We do think that opportunities as an [individual contributor] in finance could grow. In many cases, the diversity of career paths you can get in finance could broaden as well.”
Learning (and teaching) on the job
New finance and accounting hires will be expected to think strategically and provide valuable insight but also know the basics.
“The opportunities and timeframe for entry-level professionals to acquire fundamental, siloed accounting and finance skills during the entry-level period have been significantly reduced,” said Sam Yee, ACMA, CGMA, a senior vice president for a listed company in Hong Kong.
That could require a new approach to learning on the job, Crump said.
“Where 30 years ago I learned critical thinking skills by working through cash and equity, [early-career professionals] don’t touch them anymore,” she said. “They are having to get that critical thinking skill in a different way, and it has to be more purposefully taught.”
With early-stage jobs changing so quickly, companies must encourage education on the job, said Michelle Randall, CPA, CGMA, an AICPA board member and educator.
“We can’t just send [new hires] out there and say, ‘You’re consultants.’”
Randall has focused her teaching on practical, iterative examples. Students and new hires have to be given low-stakes assignments where they can make and learn from mistakes, she said.
“Learning starts with a clear set of instructions and requires frequent checkpoints throughout the process,” Randall said. Companies also must set the expectation that supervisors are educators.
“Are we teaching supervisors how to be good instructors? Are supervisors providing meaningful and timely feedback?” she asked. “These are essential for continuous learning on the job for new hires.”
Crump said that new finance graduates, and new hires, must receive an education in the entire business.
“Understanding the entire business cycle of an organisation is key,” she said. “You have to be broad because the narrow technical [work], AI is doing that.”
Employers should set the expectation that new hires will work across the organisation, Fernando said.
“They can develop their people. Instead of spending years on the same task, they’re doing multiple tasks,” he said. Through moulding their people’s skills and roles, “you’ll get more all-rounders in the future”, he said.
Preparing graduates for AI-enabled finance jobs
Learning the business is one thing, but today’s graduates must also master emerging AI technologies.
“People will be working a lot more closely with machines,” Nagy said. “Ultimately, jobs are becoming increasingly shared between humans and AI.
Educators and employers must teach AI usage intentionally, said Thereza Raquel Sales de Aguiar, ACMA, CGMA, Ph.D., senior lecturer at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen, who stressed she was not speaking during the interview for her employer or any organisations she is affiliated with.
“Students, when they are well informed on how generative AI works, they tend to use it properly, and they tend to use it to their own benefit, to create critical thinking and to reduce their time on tasks,” de Aguiar said.
But, she cautioned, the “do everything” promises of generative AI can lull graduates into using the platforms in ways that breach academic integrity, copyrights, privacy, and security or that produce unreliable or biased results.
“The students don’t know that this powerful tool can hallucinate,” de Aguiar said. She added that improper use of AI can even hurt candidates in the job search, resulting in generic CVs and cover letters.
Involve workers in AI planning
That’s why education in AI tools is critical both at the academic and professional level. Nair suggested that organisations should involve entry-level and early-career workers in AI working groups as they shape the future uses of the technology.
“They need to recognize that young graduates not only have an immense thirst for knowledge, but also a remarkable ability to grasp new concepts, technologies, and ways of working,” she said.
Entry-level professionals should also learn about cybersecurity and data privacy, since those are key for the safe use of AI, Yee said.
Bilous recommended job candidates focus on smaller organisations.
“Jobs in small and medium-sized companies are still there, but they are often harder to access because they are less visible on the open market and are frequently filled through personal networks, referrals, or direct approaches,” she said. She also urged graduates to “actively target” those companies.
Those smaller companies are now working to incorporate automation and AI, which could be a valuable experience for recent graduates, Bilous added.
“[In] my view, the winning profile today is finance foundation plus data literacy plus human judgement,” she said. “And that is exactly the combination increasingly expected at every level of hiring in finance, starting from entry level.”
The most advanced organisations now have “deep, foundational digital courses” to teach skills like generative AI use and data visualisation, Nagy said. Companies also will increasingly hire from outside of traditional finance backgrounds as they search for tech expertise, he said.
But he stressed that just like other expertise, many tech skills will be learned on the job.
“We continue to believe that most of the true skills that people develop that will help them excel in these roles … you’ll get from experiences,” he said.
The finance jobs of the future
The experts interviewed for this article were optimistic that management accounting will offer viable and valuable careers long into the future.
“You cannot ask the machine to go to the factory floor and talk to employees, to identify opportunities for efficiencies,” de Aguiar said. “We [as humans] can gather information and suggest customised/tailored strategies.”
De Aguiar added that a focus on specific topics like accounting for sustainability or forensic accounting, or a combination with other studies such as law, can fortify a career.
Despite the changes, organisations of all sizes will still need skilled employees to make the most of AI, Nagy said — to move beyond mere automation and achieve improved decision-making.
“[AI] is not yet translating at most organisations to true cost reduction, nor is it translating to the actual holy grail that people are aspiring to, which is frankly better decision support,” Nagy said. “One of the big bottlenecks around that is that people are not adequately skilled today to reap the full rewards from AI.”
So just as they invest in automation, de Aguiar added, employers must invest in their human capital.
“Technology can be capital, but human capital is much harder and difficult to develop, and it is a valuable capital,” she said. “And if employers lose this capital, it can be difficult to catch up.”
As Randall put it: “You’re not just hiring for a year. You’re hiring so that five years down the road, you have really good managers in place, and [further] down the road you have your next partners and leaders of your organisation.”
Starting a finance career in the hybrid workplace and beyond
Automation isn’t the only way technology is changing the workplace. Companies have increasingly embraced hybrid, distributed workplaces where teams may be split across multiple hubs, or even multiple countries.
In the US, of those jobs that can be worked remotely, 52% are hybrid, while 26% are exclusively remote, according to Gallup. Remote work options are often popular with employees, granting more flexibility and saving on commute time and costs.
But they also bring challenges for early-career employees, who may struggle to connect with colleagues and acclimatise to the team’s culture and ways of working.
“For many young professionals, full remote may not be the strongest learning model because a lot of real development still happens through observation, informal conversations, and day-to-day exposure to how experienced people think and work,” said Iryna Bilous, ACMA, CGMA, head of finance—Finance & M&A IT for Novartis in Czechia.
Nisha Nair, ACMA, CGMA, an internal audit specialist in the public sector in the Middle East, said: “Joining a new organisation today can be more daunting than when I started my career, when we could learn by observing our seniors, picking up social cues, and being able to turn to a colleague sitting nearby for guidance.”
That requires a change in approach from new employees, she said.
“They need to be able to lead and take ownership of their work proactively, rather than waiting for direction from a manager or more experienced colleague. They need to take initiative to deliver results, contribute valuable insights, and maintain visibility in a remote work environment,” Nair said.
Bilous agreed, saying that any remote worker needs “to compensate consciously by building informal relationships, joining professional communities, including face-to-face interactions, asking for feedback frequently, and learning beyond their formal task list”.
The technology solutions integrator company Insight Enterprises has moved from a full-time, in-office system to a distributed hub model, with offices around the world. The real challenge, Chief Accounting Officer Rachael Crump said, is not in the technological implementation.
Instead, hybrid arrangements depend on managers creating time and opportunities for newer employees to get feedback on their work and learn from colleagues. Leaders must proactively set the tone.
“You have to go into it with an open mindset that it’s going to work. The biggest obstacle is mindset, and then communication,” she said. “I don’t think technology fixes either of those.”
Andrew Kenney is a freelance writer based in the US. To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Oliver Rowe at Oliver.Rowe@aicpa-cima.com.
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Articles
“Productivity Gains Hinge on People as Much as Technology”, FM magazine, 14 May 2026
“How Are Finance Teams Really Using AI and Automation?”, FM magazine, 28 April 2026
“AICPA and CIMA Launch AI Accelerator Skills Program to Prepare Finance Leaders for an AI Enabled Future”, AICPA and CIMA, 27 April 2026
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