The auditors were meant to be gone by now. Grant Thornton is paying them £40,000
In 2013 the job was given a 94% chance of being computerised. In 2027 it comes with a partner assigned to you on day one.
In September 2013, two Oxford researchers put a number on the future of the auditor: 94%.
That was the probability Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne gave to “accountants and auditors” being computerised, in a paper that ranked 702 American occupations by how easily software could take them over. Auditors came 589th, down among the jobs most at risk. The paper went everywhere, and for a decade it was the footnote behind every confident remark that auditing was a career with an expiry date.
Thirteen years later, on 28 September 2026, Grant Thornton announced what a graduate will get for starting that job in London next autumn: £40,000, a £5,000 bonus and a partner assigned to them from the first morning.
It looks as if one of those two things must be wrong. Neither is, and the reason is the most useful thing a graduate can know about this job.
What the forecast actually said
The 94% was never a prediction that auditors would be sacked. Frey and Osborne were estimating whether the work could, technically, be done by a computer. They said so in the paper: “We make no attempt to estimate how many jobs will actually be automated.”
The number described the tasks. Almost everyone heard it as describing the people.
That included the profession. In May 2016, Business Insider reported a senior EY executive saying graduate recruitment at auditors and accountants could fall by as much as 50% by 2020. It did not happen on that timetable. But in June 2025, City AM reported that KPMG's graduate intake had gone from 1,399 in 2023 to 942, a cut of 29%, with Deloitte down 18%, EY 11% and PwC 6%.
The research points the same way. A study of 36 of the largest US accounting firms between 2010 and 2019 found that firms investing more in AI later had fewer audits that needed correcting, and fewer accountants: 3.6% fewer three years on, 7.1% fewer after four. Those were the machine-learning tools of the 2010s, before anyone had typed a question into a chatbot.
So the forecast was not silly. And yet the job is still here. The US counted 1,595,200 accountants and auditors in 2025 and expects 5% more by 2035. ICAEW, the main chartered accountancy body in England and Wales, had 37,834 students in training worldwide in 2025, up from 30,241 in 2019, although the number of new students has slipped from a record 12,225 in 2023 to 10,750.
The job did not vanish. The way in got narrower.
What Grant Thornton is offering
This is the market Grant Thornton has chosen to walk into with its chequebook out.
Its advert for a London audit graduate starting in autumn 2027 lists a salary of £40,000. City AM puts the Big Four's London graduate pay at roughly £30,000 to £36,000. The same £40,000 appears on the firm's London tax and advisory graduate adverts, and City AM reports “proportionate” rises for graduates outside London.
Then come the parts that are not money:
- A named partner as your sponsor from day one.
- Secondments to other parts of the firm and abroad, plus more time with clients.
- A fully funded professional qualification, with paid study leave.
- AI tools from the first day.
- Support that continues after you qualify. The firm calls the two stages Ascent and Summit, and describes the whole thing as a path from trainee to partner.
The small print matters. The “golden hello”, as the Telegraph called it, is two payments of £2,500: one when you join, one when you pass your professional qualification, which usually takes about three years. The secondments are described as opportunities. Nobody has been promised a desk in Sydney. And the first cohort does not start until September 2027, so there is no evidence yet that any of it works.
Why a partner, and why secondments
Here is the part Grant Thornton has not said out loud, so treat it as our reading and not theirs.
If you believed the 94%, this is the graduate scheme you would build.
The firm's own figures show where the routine work is going. Its latest transparency report counts 62 digital audit tools, used 190,000 times in 2025, saving an estimated 300,000 hours. One of them reads board minutes. That is the firm's own estimate, and hours saved are not the same thing as better audits, but 300,000 hours of work is a great deal of what trainees used to do.
That work was dull. It was also the training. You learned what a suspicious number looks like by checking several thousand unsuspicious ones, with someone more senior looking over your shoulder.
The regulator has noticed the problem this leaves. In guidance published in March 2026, the Financial Reporting Council said that however much AI a firm uses, “the human auditor is always accountable”. It warns about staff trusting a tool too readily, and about tools that sound fluent and confident even when they are wrong.
Somebody has to be able to tell when the machine is wrong. That somebody is, eventually, the graduate. If they are no longer going to learn it from the pile of invoices, they need to learn it from people and from variety: a partner who knows their name, and a run of different clients, teams and countries. Which is, more or less, the brochure.
Grant Thornton's own explanation is plainer. It wants partners. The firm, majority owned by the private equity investor Cinven since a deal that valued it at up to £1.5bn, has said it intends to appoint 160 new partners by the end of 2027. Its chief people officer, Abigail Fisher, called the pay “a very deliberate signal about who we are”. The two explanations do not compete. A firm whose software does the checking needs fewer people who can only check, and more who can one day sign.
If you are thinking of applying
A partner sponsor is a name on a form until they do something. Before you accept anyone's £40,000, ask:
- What will I do by hand in my first year, and what will the tools do before I see it? The advert promises “selecting samples, gathering evidence”. Ask how much.
- What is my sponsor expected to do for me, and how often will we meet?
- How many of the current trainees have been on a secondment, and who decides who goes?
- What happens to the second £2,500 if I need a resit, or leave soon after qualifying?
- If I am not in London, what is the salary?
None of these are rude questions. A firm that has thought properly about training people alongside AI will enjoy answering them.
The 94% was a number about tasks: the sampling, the matching, the checking. It had nothing to say about the person who decides whether the answer makes sense. It has taken thirteen years, but somebody has finally put a price on the other 6%.
References
Grant Thornton UK. Grant Thornton launches pioneering early careers programme with market-leading pay. 28 September 2026. The firm's announcement of the September 2027 programme: partner sponsor, secondments, AI tools, Ascent and Summit. It calls the pay market-leading but gives no figure.
Grant Thornton UK. Private Capital Audit Graduate Programme (Autumn 2027), London. Job advert, read 1 October 2026. Source for the £40,000 salary, the £5,000 milestone bonus paid half on joining and half on qualifying, and the description of first-year work. One London advert; individual offer terms may differ.
City AM. Grant Thornton takes on Big Four giants with new £40K salary for London grads. 29 September 2026. Source for the Big Four London salary comparison, the regional increases and the target of 160 new partners by the end of 2027. The rival salaries are the paper's figures, not confirmed by each firm.
The Telegraph, republished by Yahoo Finance. Grant Thornton offers graduates £5,000 ‘golden hellos’. 29 September 2026. Source for the “golden hello” label and the two payments of £2,500.
Grant Thornton UK. Grant Thornton UK sets out plans to build the profession's leading early careers programme. 1 May 2026. Source for Abigail Fisher's quotation and the valuation of up to £1.5bn following Cinven's investment.
Frey and Osborne. The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? Oxford Martin School working paper, 17 September 2013. Pages 46 and 74. Accountants and auditors are ranked 589 of 702 US occupations with a probability of 0.94; the authors state that they do not estimate how many jobs will actually be automated. US occupations, not the UK.
Business Insider. AI could reduce graduate hiring at ‘Big Four’ accountants by 50%. 10 May 2016. Reports, citing the Financial Times, an EY executive's forecast that graduate recruitment could fall by as much as 50% by 2020. A conditional forecast, reported second hand.
City AM. Big Four slash graduate jobs as AI takes on entry level work. 23 June 2025. Source for the graduate intake cuts at KPMG, Deloitte, EY and PwC since 2023. The article does not name the source of its figures and does not show that AI caused the cuts.
Fedyk, Hodson, Khimich and Fedyk. Is artificial intelligence improving the audit process? Review of Accounting Studies, volume 27, pages 938–985, 2022. 36 of the largest US audit firms, 2010 to 2019. The headcount and restatement figures are associations with a one standard deviation rise in AI investment, not proof of cause, and predate generative AI.
US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Outlook Handbook: Accountants and Auditors. Page last modified 27 August 2026. Source for 1,595,200 US jobs in 2025 and projected 5% growth from 2025 to 2035. All accountants and auditors, at every level of seniority.
ICAEW. Annual Report and Financial Statements 2025. Page 3. Source for 37,834 ACA students and 10,750 new students in 2025. Worldwide figures for one professional body.
ICAEW. Annual Report 2023: Financial Review and Statements. Page 104. Source for 30,241 ACA students in 2019 and the record 12,225 new students in 2023.
Grant Thornton UK. Transparency Report 2025. Page 29 of the PDF. Source for 62 digital audit tools, 190,000 uses and an estimated 300,000 hours saved in 2025. The firm's own estimate, not an independent measure of audit quality.
Financial Reporting Council. Innovative new guidance supports audit firm adoption of emerging AI technologies. 30 March 2026. Announcement of the Generative and Agentic AI Guidance. Source for the accountability quotation and the warnings about over-trusting fluent tools. Guidance on using AI in audit, not a forecast of jobs.