The numbers come first. Vidya Peters, CEO of DataSnipper, says audit and finance are already in crisis because the field has too few people, not too much automation. She said there are 'two to two and a half x as many jobs open than there are people to do those jobs,' and called the profession's attrition rates the highest.
Federal labor data backs up the shortage. About 1.96 million Americans worked as accountants and auditors in 2019, according to annual averages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Population Survey. By 2022, that number had fallen to about 1.65 million, a loss of more than 300,000 workers. The workforce has since partly recovered to about 1.77 million in 2025, but that still leaves the profession roughly 200,000 people short of where it stood before the pandemic.
The pipeline is not filling the gap fast enough. Schools awarded 55,152 accounting bachelor's and master's degrees in the 2023-24 academic year, down 6.6% from the year before, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Enrollment in accounting programs rose 12.4% in spring 2025, the highest total since 2020, but the demand side keeps climbing. The BLS projects about 115,300 openings for accountants and auditors every year through 2035, most of them to replace workers who retire or leave the field.
Peters pushed back on the familiar Silicon Valley line that AI will erase white-collar work on a broad scale. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicted in February that most tasks involving 'sitting down at a computer,' accounting among them, will be fully automated within a year to 18 months. Peters dismissed that claim, saying, 'you can’t expect a great brand if that’s your headline.' She also said, 'Whenever you ask this question, pay attention to who’s answering the question,' arguing that people talking about AI speak from 'their own biased, vested interest perspective.'
Her pitch is that auditors are already embedded in daily life, whether people notice them or not. She said an auditor has checked the security testing behind Face ID, a government auditor has confirmed taxpayer money built subway infrastructure, and multiple audit functions sit behind email, retirement accounts and utility bills. 'Nothing works unless someone is checking and ensuring that you can trust that it works,' she said.
Peters and investor Hannah Seal of Index Ventures both framed the problem as a mismatch between rising demand and shrinking supply. Seal wrote that as regulations increase and businesses become more complex, fewer people are joining the profession and many who do 'burn out under the heavy manual workload.' That is the real AI story here: not a labor market where machines have made people obsolete, but one where the work already exceeds the available talent.
For free enterprise, the lesson is simple. When a profession sits at the center of trust, capital allocation and compliance, shortages ripple far beyond the office door. If AI can reduce manual work without lowering standards, the market should welcome it. But the burden still falls on firms, schools and regulators to make sure the pipeline of skilled people does not keep shrinking while the paperwork gets heavier.
