Growing business
How AI is flipping the graduate career ladder
GROWING BUSINESS
How AI is flipping the graduate career ladder
Exploring accountancy’s AI Generation – a deep dive into how AI is changing the ambitions, expectations and working habits of early-career finance talent. Last year, Intuit QuickBooks looked at the entrepreneurial mindset of young accountants. This year, the focus shifts to AI: how the next generation is using it, what they expect from employers, and how it could reshape the profession.
This article looks at the emerging knowledge divide between AI-native graduates and more senior colleagues, and what that means for finance departments.
A new dynamic
The rules of the traditional career ladder appear to be being rewritten, and it is the AI-fluent workforce that is the catalyst. As the first AI-native cohort enters work, businesses should expect shifts not only in technology adoption, but in how teams are managed.
For decades, the pattern was always the same. Experience flowed downwards, and senior colleagues trained juniors. The introduction of AI however, means knowledge now needs to flow upwards as well.
Intuit QuickBooks surveyed 1,003 18–24-year-old accountancy students and early-career finance professionals in the UK. Almost all respondents (90%) feel prepared to succeed in their first AI-enabled workplace. The same proportion believes they will be better equipped to use AI tools than future managers or senior colleagues. Only 12% believe they should wait for senior managers to lead the way.
It could be easy to chalk these figures up to the overconfidence of would-be Gen Z workers, many of whom are yet to experience life at the coalface. But this would be an oversimplification, and 50% of this sample have already hit the job market. The future workplace isn’t one where junior staff seek to seize control from their more seasoned counterparts. However, there may be a need to review and adapt management structures, particularly those that are wrapped around junior staff.
The AI-native workforce is here
Meet the AI generation. For this cohort, AI isn’t a sandpit for testing and experimentation. AI is their everyday reality and work without these tools is inconceivable. The majority (87%) think they would be slower without AI tools, 91% say AI will be a vital partner in career growth, and 81% believe AI will become an essential skill for accountants in every role.
Universities are already seeking to adapt to the widespread use of AI in assignments. According to recent HEPI research, 94% of UK undergraduates use generative AI to help with assessed work. And in Intuit QuickBooks’ research, 74% of early-career accountancy and finance respondents use AI daily or multiple times a day to learn, work and problem-solve. Most graduates are entering work with habits already formed.
Those habits will inevitably shape what they expect from the workplace. For a generation accustomed to using AI to learn, solve problems and work more efficiently, access to intelligent tools will increasingly be an expectation rather than a perk. That means firms need to consider not only how they adopt AI, but how they embed it into the everyday workflows of their people. Intuit is doing exactly that through Intuit Intelligence, integrating AI directly into financial workflows to help tackle routine work, surface insights and support better business decisions.
Mind the capability gap
There are two camps starting to establish themselves – and a potential capability gap in the middle. On one side, there are the more experienced colleagues who hold deeper professional judgement, business context and regulatory knowledge. On the other, there are the junior colleagues who hold stronger fluency in everyday AI use.
This spread of skills can be both a blessing and a curse. In one scenario, the team could become polarised, with each camp dissatisfied about how the other carries out its daily tasks. In the ideal scenario, the business leadership prevents a generational contest from deepening, acknowledges the capability gap that is present, and sets out to close that gap, pairing AI fluency with experience.
An organisation that is positioned to flourish recognises that knowledge can and should flow both ways. AI will increasingly become an important tool for the entire workforce. The goal should be one unified workforce that spans generations, where everyone feels empowered and equipped to succeed in the era of AI.
AI is accelerating early careers
As well as being a tool for efficiency and innovation, AI is also a career accelerator – a fact that hasn’t been lost on new entrants to accountancy. The Intuit QuickBooks study found that 90% believe AI will help them advance faster.
If last year’s Intuit QuickBooks study identified a new wave of entrepreneurial accountants, this year’s study shows industry newcomers who are equally ambitious and ready to quickly progress and take on more responsibility. Traditionally, businesses have rewarded time served, technical grounding and exposure to more complex work over several years. That will not disappear, but AI could compress parts of the journey.
By taking on more of the routine, repetitive work that has traditionally occupied the early years of an accounting career, AI has the potential to give junior professionals earlier exposure to higher-value work and more opportunities to build the judgement, commercial understanding and analytical skills that underpin progression.
That shift is also changing how AI tools are being developed. Rather than simply answering questions, they are increasingly able to carry out tasks on a user’s behalf. Intuit Intelligence, for example, allows users to set up personalised automations for recurring tasks using plain language, reducing time spent on repetitive processes and freeing up capacity for analysis and decision-making.
Elsewhere in the data, 36% expect stronger technical and data skills to matter more. The next generation of accountants expect rapid career progression but are cognisant of the capabilities needed to get them there. Having already used AI to support their academic work, they will expect to use it to further their careers.
Middle managers matter more, not less
None of this happens with unbridled optimism and AI stardust alone. Strong leadership matters more than ever, and middle managers gain – rather than lose – relevance. However, the way they operate will have to change.
If AI handles more routine work, and juniors arrive with stronger AI habits, what is the role of the middle manager? In response to this changing landscape, we will see middle managers become less like task distributors and more like judgement layers.
We should expect to see five main shifts:
From checking work to checking systems — Rather than ‘marking homework’ by checking routine tasks, middle managers will become more strategic. They will oversee AI-assisted outputs, prompts, audit trails and quality controls.
From gatekeeping knowledge to sharing context — Juniors may know the tools, but managers know clients, risk, regulation and business consequences. Both competencies need to coexist for successful AI deployment. Managers will use their experience to boost the effectiveness of AI use.
From supervising process to coaching judgement — If AI removes some repetitive learning tasks, managers must teach judgement more deliberately. That extends beyond correcting outputs and into the territory of explaining the informed decisions that managers regularly make.
From top-down adoption to two-way learning — Managers set the governance and guardrails on AI use, allowing juniors some freedom to shape practical use cases.
From career ladder to skills lattice — Managers will appreciate that progress may depend less on tenure and more on a mix of AI fluency, ethics, judgement, communication and technical grounding.
The finance function five years from now will look less like a department that produces reports and more like a real-time strategic centre for the business. The manual work that consumes the finance team today is largely handled by AI agents working continuously in the background, with clear transparency of their actions, and oversight and control maintained by the finance team. The scope of the finance leader only grows, providing the essential human intelligence that AI cannot replace. The shift is cultural as much as it is technological.
AI confidence comes with caution
An important point to make is that this cohort of accountants is AI-positive, but not naïve. Three quarters (77%) are concerned about becoming overly reliant on AI. A similar number (77%) are concerned about accuracy and reliability. More than nine in 10 (93%) have concerns about maintaining data security when using AI tools. Gen Z appreciates the benefits AI can offer, but they don’t embrace it blindly. They want to use AI at work, but they also want guardrails.
Sami Malik, Finance Assistant, said, “Learning how to use AI is one of the best ways to stand out early in your career, but using it isn't just about writing good prompts. It's about accountability – understanding the output, checking it properly and knowing when to question it.
"AI takes away the tedious work and gives accountants more time to think creatively, solve problems and improve processes. That's where people will add the most value in the future, while still taking responsibility for reviewing AI's work."
How finance teams can keep control, and build structure and governance
Finance leaders should treat AI as a management challenge. The first step is to understand where capability already sits across the team. AI fluency will not always map neatly to seniority, so leaders need to gather a clear view of who is using these tools, how they are using them, and where confidence could be outpacing control.
From there, the priority is to close the gap without creating a generational divide. Both sides have knowledge that the other needs. Reverse mentoring can help junior employees share practical AI habits, while experienced colleagues provide the judgement, context and governance needed to use AI responsibly.
The finance leader remains in control at all times. Junior staff are not left to rely on AI alone. AI comes in for parts of the job; understanding a plain-language question, matching a vendor name spelled three different ways across systems, suggesting the optimal chart of account structure for consolidated reporting, drafting recurring entries, detecting anomalies, and performing forecasts, for example.
Intuit’s platform embeds human decision making and accountability throughout the process. The combination of AI and deterministic logics means that standard, high-confidence workflows can be handled autonomously, while any task requiring genuine judgment is flagged for human review. Nothing is posted, transferred, or finalised without direct approval, and there’s a clear audit trail.
Finance teams need approved tools, clear rules and visible guardrails. Data security, confidentiality, accuracy checks and human sign-off should be built into daily workflows, not bolted on after mistakes happen.
Leaders should also rethink progression frameworks. If AI allows early-career accountants to take on analysis, and forecasting sooner, promotion cannot be measured by time served alone. Firms will need to reward judgement, communication, ethics, technical skill and responsible AI use as a combined set of capabilities.
The research also points to a change in how the next generation expects to interact with financial technology. Rather than treating AI as a separate tool, graduates increasingly expect it to sit within the software they use every day: 89% say a conversational AI assistant built directly into financial software would be extremely or very useful. They see its application ranging from analysing financial data and generating reports to getting real-time answers about business performance.
This points towards a more discursive way of working with financial data, where users can interrogate information and explore different outcomes without moving between multiple tools or manually assembling the analysis. Intuit Intelligence reflects this direction, enabling users to generate reports and summaries from their business data and surface insights to inform decisions. Its expanding business intelligence capabilities also include financial planning and “what-if” modelling, allowing teams to examine how different scenarios could affect measures such as cash flow, revenue and net income.
Embedded AI tools can help bring intelligence into the flow of financial work, but technology alone will not solve the knowledge divide. Firms need the right training and the right management structure.
The marker of success isn’t simply rolling out AI to everyone unfettered. It is about building an entire workforce confident enough to use it, and careful enough to use it well.
A new model for finance leadership
Accountancy, and professional services more broadly, will change irrevocably – not just because of the new tools being used, but because of the effect these tools will have. AI-native graduates have high expectations of what AI will do for their daily work and their careers.
Ambitious as they might be, these new entrants won’t replace managers. But the biggest legacy of the technology will be the way it will change what good management looks like. The best approach for the future is one where juniors bring fluency, managers bring judgement, and both learn faster together.
Practical tips for success
ACCA recommends five top tips to help finance leaders build AI capability across their teams while maintaining the judgement and oversight needed to use it responsibly.
Invest in structured AI learning — Don’t rely on employees to develop their AI skills alone. Provide structured opportunities to build AI capability and teach broader AI literacy, not simply how to use individual tools.
Set clear guardrails for AI use — Be explicit about which AI tools are approved, how they should be used and where accountability sits for AI-assisted work. Employees should understand that they remain responsible for the output, not the technology, and know where human judgement is required.
Make learning flow both ways — Use reverse mentoring and AI champions to make the most of different capabilities across the finance team. Younger employees can bring confidence and practical experience with emerging tools, while experienced colleagues bring business context, professional judgement and oversight.
Rethink how you develop and progress talent — As AI changes the work people do early in their careers, progression may increasingly be based on capability growth, demonstrated competencies and technical skills rather than tenure or hierarchy alone. Leaders should consider how development frameworks reflect this shift.
Develop the human skills AI can’t replace — Build critical thinking, communication and business-context interpretation alongside AI capability. Finance professionals need to be able to question AI-assisted outputs, understand data limitations and turn information into insights that support better business decisions.
Summary
The arrival of the AI Generation is not simply changing the tools finance teams use; it has the potential to change how people learn, develop and progress. By combining the AI fluency of emerging talent with the experience and judgement already within their teams, finance leaders can turn a generational capability shift into an opportunity – for their people and for the business.
About the research
Intuit QuickBooks surveyed 1,003 UK respondents aged 18–24. The sample included third-year accounting students and people studying for, or recently completing, ICAEW, ACCA or CIMA qualifications, who are not yet in a qualified role. Fieldwork was conducted between 1 and 11 June 2026.
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