The Quiet Sellout Of Gen Z by Professional Services

Grant Thornton just made it official.

Tom Puthiyamadam twenty-eight years at PwC, now national managing principal of advisory at GT, has tied partner year-end bonuses to AI adoption. Not as one factor among many. As a non-negotiable. “If you’re not on the boat, choose a different boat.” The new scorecard hit every partner on January 1, 2026. The strategy is explicit: AI lowers unit cost while dramatically lifting the volume of clients each partner can serve. Revenue up. Cost down. Same partner roster. Better margin per chair.

This is not a Grant Thornton story. PwC put $1B into generative AI and became OpenAI’s largest enterprise customer. KPMG put $2B into a Microsoft alliance. Deloitte committed $3B through 2030 and is scrapping traditional consulting titles in June. EY closed a $1.4B AI build. Accenture put $3B into data and AI. 

The press releases call it transformation. Read the financials and the org charts and it is something simpler, a coordinated repricing of professional services in which the firm sells AI-leveraged senior judgment at senior rates while deleting the layer that used to do the actual work.

Look at who pays the price. UK Big Four graduate intake is down between 6 and 29 percent. Graduate job postings in accounting and consulting fell 44 percent year-on-year. EY has delayed graduate start dates three years running. PwC US laid off 1,800 in October 2024 and another 1,500 last May. The juniors who used to do document review, control testing, workpaper builds, they are the line item being optimized out. AI does the work. Partners keep the margin. The board likes the slide.

Here is the part nobody on the earnings call wants to discuss. The pyramid was not just a profit structure. It was the apprenticeship pipeline. Junior staff did grunt work because that is how senior staff got built, by doing thousands of hours of the work before they were trusted to review it. Cut the base and you have not just cut headcount. You have cut the conveyor belt that produces the next generation of senior practitioners. In ten years the partner expected to know what a real control looks like will have spent his first three years prompting a model and approving its output. He will not have done the work. He will have supervised the appearance of the work.

Firms are buying near-term margin by spending down their long-term bench. The partners making this call will be retired before the bill comes due. The seed corn is being eaten in public, with a nice press release attached.