End-to-End AI Impact Assessments Are The Key To A Skilled Future Workforce

Developing a future workforce in the era of AI is already a current challenge for business leaders world over, and some are clearly not shying away from doing so.  

Meta has garnered headlines recently with reports that it intends to continue with its rapid and large-scale downsizing of its overall headcount, whilst reportedly offering 4 year pay packages running into the hundreds of millions to poach top AI talent.

Most business leaders should not fear having to add to their payrolls such extravagantly well-paid employees, but they should certainly be looking at the skills their future workforce will be needing to survive in the AI era.

The AI journey of the Big 4

Media coverage indicates the bigger tech firms and consultancies are actively preparing their future workforces, as each month there are stories of them removing chunks of their existing workforce whilst, with sometimes less attention, simultaneously recruiting all new employees into new roles.

Looking at the Big 4, it is not difficult to see why their industry is one of the first to have to adjust to AI.  Their core services of auditing, assurance, compliance and tax are a world of highly defined structures and big data. In other words, the perfect ecosystem for AI to inhabit.

Alan Paton, a former PwC’s partner, last year declared that “most structured, data-heavy tasks in audit, tax, and strategic advisory, will be automated within the next three to five years”.  

With such AI powered automation entering their industrial domain, the Big 4 are having to ask an obvious question from their clients- why pay big consultancy fees year in and year out when there may be an AI tool that deliver the work more quickly and cheaply?

The Big 4 response is to offer their own AI solutions to their clients – Deloitte have Zora AI, PwC have PwC One, KPMG have their Workbench and EY have EY.ai. These proprietary AI platforms are the results of billions in investment and are effectively new market offerings to keep hold of their clients. But, even if their clients are tempted by alternative solution providers or to develop their own internal systems, there still remains the potential for the Big 4 to offer AI auditing and assurance.

And these changes in their market offerings will necessitate changes to organisational operations. Gone will be the days of billable hours, but invoices now based on outcomes and deliverables or annual licensing charges. And, with AI undertaking data analysis, document review, reconciliations, data entry, invoice accuracy checks, the sending of standardised letters, preliminary basic audits and so forth; the traditional tasks of junior level resources will be greatly reduced. This is already evident with graduate recruitment cuts – as an example; 2025 graduate job openings for accountancy in the UK dropped year-on-year by 44%, reflecting a steeper decline than in the overall graduate jobs market.

The effect of this will be a transitioning of the traditional Big 4 ‘pyramid’ organisational structure into a more diamond shape. A relatively bigger middle, with new roles such as AI engineers, data scientists and AI workflow designers.

An end-to-end AI Impacts Assessment framework

The journey the Big 4 have taken in recent years allows for an assessment framework that leaders of any organisation can apply in planning their own future workforce, with key questions to ask of themselves at each of the four phases: 

• The first assessment should look at the wider industry which their organisation exists in – questioning what new technologies, legislation or emerging competitors are reshaping the industry. 
• The second assessment should like at how the business must change in response to the changes in its industry – questioning how internal systems, operations or market offerings need to change. 
• The third assessment should look at how the business needs to organisationally change to support its new business strategies and directions – questioning how its internal structures need to change and what new functions, teams and cultures are needed. 
• The fourth assessment should look at how the organisation’s employees need to change to fit into the newly desired organisational structure and strategies – questioning what new roles, skills and ways of working are needed. 

Following the four phases of the framework will provide business leaders with a logical approach that can guide them towards how their organisation’s workforce should change in terms of organisational structure, size, culture and roles. And once these aspects of the workforce have been determined, the findings will help leaders identify what skills their organisation will need in the future.

The trade-off and tensions of reskilling

But there remains the challenge of how business leaders will have to choose their strategy to develop the skills of their future workforce.  Some leading CEOs, from the likes of Ford to Amazon have openly declared there will be major losses of white collar jobs at their organisations, whilst recognising new roles will need filling in the future.

Begging the question, have firms simply decided that some of their existing employees have no chance of fitting into their future workforce? Do they see no chance for the option of reskilling?

There are obvious benefits in reskilling an existing workforce such as keeping years of inhouse experience, saving redundancy and recruitment costs and avoiding the pressures of hunting for the best resources in what may be a limited pool of talent.  But these benefits will be competing with the viability, costs and efforts of retraining a workforce.

In planning their future workforce, leaders will have to compare the cost and benefits of reskilling vs simple churn. Some have already done so.

Accenture CEO, Julie Sweet, openly said in 2025 that the consulting giant was “exiting people on a compressed timeline where reskilling is not a viable path for the skills we need.” And, with Accenture having recently jettisoned over 10,000 employees in the previous financial year, whilst still expecting to increase headcount in the next financial year, it appears a strategic decision was made that a significant number of workers were simply not considered viable for reskilling in the time frames being afforded to them.

But what if the times frames were extended? Would existing employees have a greater chance of reskilling if the timelines afforded to them were not so “compressed”.

It is quite probable that there are existing employees in any organisation having neither the skill nor will to adapt to a new role made necessary because of AI. And in such cases, churn may be the only option. But if given enough time and focus there may be employees who can adapt and play a valuable role in an AI altered organisation.

There is a business case to be made for workforce reskilling, and it can be strengthened with leaders proactively assessing the AI impacts coming their way and giving themselves and their employees as a greater timeline as possible to prepare.