Will AI replace accountants?

Treasury's 2026 Intergenerational Report lists accountants among "some of the most highly exposed occupations" to AI, alongside receptionists and advertising and marketing professionals.

Accountants are already using AI for parts of their work, from drafting a client email to summarising a long set of notes. The Australian research so far shows AI taking on tasks within accounting work. Australia has shortages in several accounting roles, with a larger workforce gap projected over the next decade. Firms do need to look after the graduate pipeline, and the reconciliations, workpapers and first drafts where new accountants learn the job.

1What exposure to AI means

The same Treasury report says "JSA modelling suggests a greater potential for occupations to experience augmentation than automation." For many tasks, it says, "human judgement, coordination, accountability, tacit knowledge and relationships will continue to be integral."

In accounting, those qualities run through much of the work: deciding how a transaction should be treated, explaining a position to a client, and signing off work that the client and the ATO will rely on.

In its July 2026 guidance on AI, the Tax Practitioners Board says tax practitioners "are still ultimately responsible for the tax agent services they provide to their clients", and "must exercise their own professional judgement when advising clients and should not rely on AI output as a substitute for their own analysis."

The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations reported in July 2026 that "There is no evidence to date of broad AI-driven labour-market upheaval in Australia." It also found an early indication of "some modest slowing in employment growth in some highly exposed occupations", and described those results as "suggestive, but not conclusive." Xero's Modern Practice Playbook surveyed 524 senior accountants and bookkeepers across Australia. In that vendor survey, 88% of practices said they do not expect AI to reduce team numbers over the next year.

2The supply of accountants

CA ANZ reports that the national Occupation Shortage List has identified "Australia-wide shortages of external auditors for the past five years, and tax accountants for the past three years." When CA ANZ surveyed 159 of its members in early 2026, the main reason they gave for advertised vacancies going unfilled was "the lack of experienced professionals." It is a small sample of members who chose to respond.

Looking ahead, research by Oxford Economics Australia for CA ANZ forecasts a shortfall of almost 18,000 accounting, audit and finance professionals by 2035. Attrition is the biggest driver, with an estimated 108,000 workers projected to leave the profession over the coming decade. Fewer people are coming in behind them, with accounting course completions down 61% since 2018.

The Tax Practitioners Board reported in December 2025 that 57% of registered tax agents are over 50, and that most of the tax and BAS agents ending their registration are over 60. Registrations have grown steadily over the past 10 years, and most new entrants are aged 30 to 49.

3Demand for the work

On the business side, the ABS counted 2,814,778 actively trading businesses in Australia at 30 June 2026, up 3.1% on the year before. For individuals, 62.1% of tax returns for the 2023-24 income year were lodged by an agent, according to the ATO. When CPA Australia asked small businesses where they go for advice, accountants came first in its 2025-26 Australian results.

On AI, the Oxford Economics report says its impact on future demand "remains uncertain", and suggests it "will reshape the skills accountants need rather than reduce demand", with judgement, critical thinking and strategic guidance growing in importance as routine tasks are automated.

4The work juniors learn on

Many of the routine tasks AI can help with sit in a graduate's first years: coding transactions, reconciling accounts, preparing workpapers, drafting a return and following up source documents. Doing that work, and having it reviewed, is a large part of how a junior learns what right looks like and starts to build judgement.

The CA Program builds this into the qualification, asking candidates for "three years, and not less than 500 days, of approved mentored practical work experience", which aims to "develop essential on-the-job knowledge and skills".

In a CPA Australia survey of 1,117 accounting and finance professionals for its 2025 Business Technology Report, 19% of businesses across the Asia-Pacific said they had reduced or stopped filling junior or entry-level accounting roles because of AI tools. In Australia the figure was 8%. CPA Australia's Gavan Ord said that "Becoming too dependent on AI could ultimately leave businesses with a knowledge and experience chasm that AI is not yet capable of filling."

In the United States, Brynjolfsson, Chandar and Chen at Stanford used payroll data and found that employment of workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations was 19% below where it would have been had it kept pace with their less-exposed peers, mostly through reduced hiring. A Harvard study by Hosseini Maasoum and Lichtinger found junior employment fell at firms that adopted generative AI while senior employment held steady, and that AI-exposed tasks appeared less often in those firms' junior job ads. Neither study is specific to accounting, and neither has been peer reviewed. In Australia, Treasury reports that the labour market for young workers and young graduates overall "is not showing measurable impacts."

In Canada, a peer-reviewed study of staff auditors published in Accounting Horizons in 2026 found technology had reduced their routine tasks and changed the way they traditionally learn on the job. The authors conclude that firms and educators "need to rethink the nature of the training" of staff auditors.

5Training juniors with AI

The experienced professionals CA ANZ members find hard to hire started out as juniors. Firms keep that pipeline going by training juniors deliberately, with AI as part of the program.

In the Thomson Reuters Institute's Future of Professionals Report 2026, a vendor survey that asked 1,816 professionals across law, tax, audit, accounting and other fields about AI, 71% said early-career roles need "structured support from experienced peers to develop the skills AI risks displacing." Nearly half (48%) were concerned about AI's effect on how people develop independent judgement.

The Tax Practitioners Board's guidance also asks practitioners to make sure the people providing tax agent services on their behalf are "appropriately supervised, having regard to knowledge and skills", within a system of quality management.

In a junior program with AI in it, a graduate may prepare their first reconciliations without AI, so they know what a correct one looks like. Later they use AI for the first pass and check it against the source documents, and the reviewer looks at the output and at how the graduate checked it. Juniors learn which tools the firm uses, what client information they can hold, and where they tend to get things wrong. For keeping the learning going after the first session, see AI training for the whole firm, and human in the loop maps where the checks sit in a piece of work.

6Setting up a junior program with AI

7Where we come in

In our investigation, we follow the work through your firm, from the first draft of a return or a set of workpapers through to review and sign-off, and see where AI sits along the way. It times the everyday work as it runs today, which gives the firm its own starting measure for any change that follows. You keep the workflow map and timing data, whether or not you continue into the program.

After that, graduates and partners alike complete AI Foundations, and cohort workshops take each group through tasks from its own team, such as reconciliations, workpapers and client queries. The program can sit alongside the practical experience juniors complete for the CA Program or CPA Program, and each team has an AI Champion to carry the program forward when our part is done. We re-measure task times at three months.

To talk through graduate training and AI for your practice, reach out. The first conversation looks at your graduate pipeline, the work AI is touching and whether the AI Uplift Program fits your practice.

A junior program with AI