That’s the subject of a conversation I had with James Tucker, who leads corporate finance and strategy globally at Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Tucker talks to hundreds of finance chiefs a year. His read: entry-level hiring hasn’t totally stopped, but the job itself is being rewritten in real time.

“The old reliable model was, ‘I’ll hire people who’ve studied and got their accounting certificates, and what they’re really good at is doing a replicable task at a high level of accuracy and quality,” Tucker said. Firms hired large cohorts to do routine finance work, like reconciliations, journal entries, and basic reporting. They then watched who rose to the top.

AI is changing that.

What replaces the old model, in Tucker’s framing, is a pillar: fewer people, hired for judgment rather than task execution, operating as quality control on top of AI-built systems rather than producing the numbers themselves.

That’s the tension. The work AI is taking over is also how junior employees traditionally developed judgment. AI can do the research, drafting and problem decomposition; junior employees get fewer chances to practice those skills.

The concern is showing up in the data. A recent working paper by Harvard researchers suggests generative AI adoption can reduce hiring of junior workers, particularly in AI-exposed jobs, while having much less effect on existing senior workers.

In a BCG global study of C-suite leaders, half said they’re already seeing “de-skilling” in their organizations, and more than 60% expect it to become a material problem within three to five years. More than half cited slower junior-talent development as an underlying driver.

So what should CFOs do?

Tucker’s answer is to replace volume with concentration—and automation with apprenticeship. Rather than spreading the remaining manual, judgment-based work, such as the roughly 10% of reconciliations that resist automation, across a large junior class, firms should concentrate those reps on fewer people so an experience curve still forms.

Junior staff also need to be in the room for real decisions, not processing “widgets” in the back office, so they absorb judgment through observation and repetition. Rotations between finance and the business can help, too. Tucker sees a consistent gap in junior talent: strong technical acumen, weak business acumen. Getting people closer to pricing, operations, and strategy gives them context that spreadsheets alone can’t provide.

Hiring criteria are shifting accordingly. Accounting skills are still desired, but there’s more focus on pattern recognition and the instinct to know when an output looks wrong.

Sheryl Estrada
Sheryl.Estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Sumita Pandit was appointed SVP and CFO of Genpact (NYSE: G), a global professional services and digital transformation company, effective Sept. 9. Pandit succeeds Michael Weiner, who has served as Genpact's CFO since 2021; he will remain as an advisor through the end of Q1 2027. Pandit brings nearly 25 years of experience and most recently served as president and CFO of Radian Group. Before Radian, she was chief operating officer of dLocal, which she led through its initial public offering. 

Ellen Conti was appointed partner and CFO of GoldenTree Asset Management, a global asset management firm. Conti joins GoldenTree from Sculptor Capital, where she served as executive managing director and CFO and was a member of the firm’s partner management committee.

Big Deal

Consumer inflation expectations offered mixed signals for CFOs planning 2027 budgets. The New York Fed’s August Survey of Consumer Expectations, released Tuesday, showed medium-term (three-year) inflation expectations easing slightly to 3.2%, while one-year and five-year expectations held steady at 3.6% and 3.0%, respectively. The data provides a nationally representative view of U.S. households.

More concerning for finance leaders tracking labor costs and consumer demand, mean unemployment expectations jumped 1.6 percentage points to 44.4%, the highest reading since April 2020. At the same time, expected quit rates rose to 19.5% and perceived job-loss risk eased to 13.8%, suggesting workers feel more mobile even as macroeconomic anxiety builds.

Household spending growth expectations ticked up to 5.2%, but that optimism is tempered by deteriorating perceptions of credit access, an increase in expected missed debt payments to 13.2%, and gas price expectations that jumped 1.7 percentage points to 4.6%.

Going deeper

AI is making it faster than ever to build software—but that doesn’t necessarily mean more software is making it into users’ hands. New Wharton research finds that while AI coding tools have dramatically boosted developer productivity, human bottlenecks around reviewing, integrating, releasing, and ultimately finding an audience remain. As AI floods the market with new applications, the bigger challenge may no longer be writing code—it’s getting people to use it.

Overheard

"The hardest thing in retail isn’t launching something new. It’s knowing what to evolve while keeping what made it iconic in the first place."

—Dayna Quanbeck, CEO of Rothy’s, wrote in a LinkedIn post. Rothy's is a popular fashion brand best known for comfortable shoes made from recycled and washable materials.