Audit and advisory firms are facing a perfect storm of population decline. Data from the AICPA shows that 75% of CPAs will reach retirement age within the decade. At the same time, the pipeline isn’t refilling. After a brief resurgence in 2023, 2024 numbers decreased again for both people graduating with accounting degrees (-11%) and sitting the CPA exam each year (-12%).
Late career professionals are leaving, fewer graduates are choosing accounting, and mid-career professionals, the ones who were supposed to be the next generation of firm leaders? They’re overworked, burning out and walking away.
What’s left is an industry running critically short on capacity, even as demand for services grows more complex and client expectations climb. Firms are expected to deliver faster, more strategic engagements while operating on outdated systems, manual workflows, and staff who are already stretched beyond their limits.
The Root Cause of Burnout
It’s easy to think of burnout as a personal challenge, or a cultural one. But in this profession, it’s a structural one. Inefficient systems don’t just create friction, they actively drive talent out. This is no longer a resourcing issue; it’s a sustainability crisis.
The findings in our latest whitepaper, The AI Adoption Paradox, make this reality impossible to ignore. We’re no longer fighting skepticism, as most firms now agree that AI improves engagement speed, reduces workloads, and strengthens profitability. But while belief in AI is nearly universal, execution is still lagging. That gap is where burnout festers. It’s where firms fail to scale. And it’s where people decide they can’t keep doing the job.
Many professionals came into this industry with the hope of helping businesses grow and staying close to the heart of financial decision-making. Instead, they’ve found themselves spending evenings reconciling spreadsheets and comparing PDFs, over and over. We’ve heard stories of managers leaving the profession not because they lacked passion, but because they lacked a path forward that didn’t require sacrificing their well-being.
When that kind of pressure becomes routine, it creates two outcomes: rising attrition, and rising costs. Recruiting new talent gets harder. Retaining experienced staff becomes more expensive. Client delivery slows. And the professionals who stay are left with even more work, perpetuating the cycle.
This is the real cost of inefficiency. Not just lost hours, but lost people. Not just process delays, but missed mentorship, underused judgment, and untapped potential.
A Better Way Forward
That’s why we’ve always viewed AI not as a tool for optimization, but as a lever for sustainability. Purpose-built, practitioner-centric AI can finally relieve the burden of manual work without diminishing the importance of human expertise. It can automate testing, documentation, and evidence gathering not to replace staff, but to give them time back for higher-value work. For coaching. For thinking. For rest.
In firms where AI is fully embedded into everyday workflow–not just piloted, but operationalized–we’re already seeing the change. Engagements are running faster, partners are spending more time on client strategy, and professionals at every level are regaining their footing.
The firms that move beyond slogans and into real execution are the ones keeping their teams intact. The ones that stall are watching talent slip away.
Burnout doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens when skilled people are asked to operate inside systems that were never designed to support them at today’s scale or speed. If we want to retain talent, we need to respect their time. If we want to grow firms, we need to modernize the work.
The audit and advisory profession is at a crossroads. Not just between manual and automated, but between surviving and sustaining. The choices we make today about how we design our processes, how we invest in our people, and how we adopt technology, will shape whether the next generation sees this field as one worth staying in.
And that future doesn’t start with vision. It starts with execution.
November 21, 2025
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