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Published August 2026 · 24 pages

The State of the AI Workforce

We asked 412 CPA firms what their agents actually did last year — not what they bought. The gap between the two is the most useful number in this report.

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Field report · 2026
The State of the AI Workforce
24 pages
412 practices surveyed UK & Ireland Fieldwork Apr–Jun 2026 Free, no gate on the summary

Four findings worth your time

The full report carries the workings. These are the numbers partners quoted back to us most often.

68%
of firms run agents on work no one signs off — drafting, chasing, tidying. The review layer is where trust is won or lost.
9.4hrs
recovered per fee earner each month, on average, once a cycle runs unattended for a full quarter.
1 in 5
pilots never reached a second client. Almost always a scoping failure, not a model one.
£41k
median annual saving for a twelve-partner firm — before any new advisory work is priced in.
Contents

Six chapters, one argument

01
What firms actually deployed
Tools bought, tools used, and the distance between them.
02
The review bottleneck
Why approval queues decide whether autonomy sticks.
03
Where the hours came back
Cycle by cycle, with the ones that disappointed included.
04
What IT asked for
Residency, retention and audit trail, ranked by how often they blocked a rollout.
05
Pricing the recovered time
Three approaches firms tried, and which held up at renewal.
06
What we expect next year
The forecasts we are willing to be held to.
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Method

Fieldwork ran between April and June 2026: 412 responses from practices in the UK and Ireland, weighted by headcount band, with 34 follow-up interviews. Where a figure rests on fewer than 40 responses we say so in the chapter rather than in a footnote.

Read the report, then run the thing

Every number in here started as somebody’s Tuesday. Bring us yours and we’ll show you the same cycle running.

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