Accounting’s big ‘wake-up call’: AI is forcing companies to rethink entry-level jobs

We don’t have to tell you that the accounting and finance industry is facing major challenges, whether it’s from AI or an aging workforce. But a recent Bamboo HR survey found a troubling datapoint for the industry—a third of new accounting and finance hires quit within their first year. The survey results also showed a 3:1 senior- to entry-level hiring ratio. Bamboo HR’s survey of full-time salaried employees, business owners, and C-suites of small to midsize businesses in the US garnered 1,248 responses between March 24 and April 9, 2026. BambooHR’s analysis is derived also from six years of workforce data—from approximately January 2020 to February 2026—encompassing over 480,000 employee data points from more than 2,000 companies around the world. Unclear remit. One root cause of the “quit” numbers among hires, at least at the entry level, BambooHR CFO Justin Judd told CFO Brew, is likely mismatched expectations between new hires and senior management amid the rise of AI. Historically, with junior-level analysts or accountants, “there’s been a fairly clear understanding of what they do,” Judd said. “You’re doing data entry work, or you’re doing base model building, or you’re building the spreadsheets that someone more senior is going to use to do analysis. You’re finding data, you’re maybe building a database to extract that data.” Now, however, “senior-level accountants and senior-level analysts in finance have new tools where they can do some of the work that used to be done by entry-level team members on their own or with the assistance of technology or other systems. What that leaves is a question of, ‘What do I do in an entry level role?’” Judd said. What’s changed for entry-level hires? “We’re seeing this even in my own teams; we have entry-level roles where we’re actually expecting a lot of them…I may not just be asking you to do some basic data entry or data work, but actually help us think differently.” While Judd recognized that these findings weren’t nece