Audit and finance face a deepening shortage of qualified people rather than the wave of white-collar automation predicted by Silicon Valley, according to Vidya Peters, chief executive of the Amsterdam-based audit automation company DataSnipper.
Peters, whose firm reached unicorn status in 2024, told an interviewer that the profession is «in crisis mode» because there are consistently two to two and a half times as many open roles as there are people to fill them. Audit also carries some of the highest attrition rates in knowledge work, she said, with demand that is highly cyclical and difficult to sustain across a career.
Her argument runs against a louder narrative from technology leaders, who have repeatedly warned that tasks performed at a computer — accounting among them — will soon be automated. Peters dismissed those predictions as marketing rather than analysis, noting that similar timelines were offered 18 months ago and have not materialised. She urged audiences to consider who is making such claims and what commercial interest sits behind them, including her own bias toward the audit and finance customers DataSnipper serves.
The workforce data supports her case. Roughly 1.96 million Americans worked as accountants and auditors in 2019, according to annual averages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 2022 that figure had fallen to about 1.65 million, a loss of more than 300,000 workers, before recovering to about 1.77 million in 2025. The profession therefore remains roughly 200,000 people short of its pre-pandemic level.
The pipeline has not closed the gap. US schools awarded 55,152 accounting bachelor's and master's degrees in the 2023-24 academic year, down 6.6 per cent on the previous year, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. There are early signs of a turn: accounting programme enrolment rose 12.4 per cent in spring 2025, the highest total since 2020. Demand, however, keeps climbing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 115,300 openings for accountants and auditors every year through 2035, most of them replacing workers who retire or leave the field.
Hannah Seal, a partner at Index Ventures, which led DataSnipper's Series B round, has described the situation as an untenable equation of growing demand and shrinking supply. As regulation increases and business structures become more complex, fewer people are entering the profession, and those who do often burn out under heavy manual workloads.
Peters argues that artificial intelligence is arriving in a labour market that was already broken, unlike legal services or copywriting, where the balance was closer to even. Used well, she contends, AI can help a limited pool of talent do more with less and make audit rewarding again. DataSnipper launched Alwin, its agentic automation platform, shortly before the interview.
She draws a distinction between building an AI agent and reviewing its work. Designing and approving an agent should be restricted to experienced auditors who understand the process and can assess it as they would a junior colleague. Checking an agent's output and deciding whether to trust it is a different task, and one that far more people can perform. «Everyone can be a human in the loop,» she said.
The stakes extend well beyond the profession. Peters points out that auditors underpin everyday trust, from the security testing behind Face ID to the taxpayer money behind a subway turnstile, an email account, a pension pot or a heating bill. When audit fails, the consequences become public, as with Enron, whose collapse led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.