KPMG Trains Interns in Critical Thinking Amid Automation

Minutes after the task began, every team loses one of its members. Management needs him for another project. Design a logo. You are not allowed to use the color blue. Only senior interns are allowed to use scissors. But all the senior interns are sick today. The logo must feature an animal associated with one of the KPMG founders. Make sure the lion or owl is dressed in business attire.

This is what one of the training tasks for summer interns at KPMG looked like.

As part of a new program launched this summer, KPMG brought nearly 1,000 interns from its audit and assurance divisions to its sprawling training complex, built at an investment of $450 million near the airport in Orlando, Florida. For several days, they underwent training in critical thinking and judgment. The logo design challenge was one of several exercises designed to develop these skills, alongside a "scavenger hunt" game and an exercise in solving a fraud case.

The goal is not amusement. Jobs in the accounting field are among the most vulnerable to the impact of artificial intelligence. KPMG estimates that within two to three years, humans will no longer perform routine checks in areas such as payroll and revenue contracts.

KPMG insights for working in the AI era

• Work with AI, not let it work alone - maintaining judgment and human oversight of the outputs

• Feel comfortable with ambiguity - getting used to uncertainty regarding how AI will affect the workplace

• Important training - as more tasks become automated, the importance of instruction grows

• Promotion by skill - those who are proficient in technology can bypass colleagues older than them

This year, the firm reduced the number of its audit partners in the US by 10%, and at the same time, it is re-examining from the ground up the role of junior accountants - college and university graduates who start their path with a salary of about $80,000 a year. At the same time, KPMG is receiving an increasing volume of audit work from its clients.

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An existential issue

The question of how to train young employees has become an existential issue for many companies using artificial intelligence to redesign the way work is done. There are CEOs who use AI tools to reduce their workforce and even predict that office jobs will disappear. Others, including Salesforce, IBM, and McKinsey, are actually increasing the recruitment of employees for entry-level positions, arguing that employees who grew up in the AI era can help advance the company. However, their daily work is changing rapidly.

Accounting firms no longer need the most junior employees they recruit to perform routine tasks that can be easily automated. This is a significant upheaval for a profession that has been characterized over the years by a clear professional advancement path.

"Quite a few people my age find it hard to accept the idea that technical skills are no longer the only thing required to succeed," says Rachel Ryan, a 22-year-old audit intern at KPMG, who studies at Miami University in Ohio. She folded the sheet of paper and tried to tear it as neatly as possible after she was forbidden to use scissors to prepare the logo.

More than 60 groups of interns huddled around tables and went over profit and loss reports, newspaper articles, and an organizational chart. They were required to determine if an employee at a bakery had committed embezzlement.

The bakery owner, who planned to expand the business and fired production workers, initially seemed like a possible suspect. But the bookkeeper also aroused suspicion. She was the first to arrive at work and the last to leave every evening.

The two-hour exercise, centered on solving the fraud case, was intended to encourage students to avoid biases and exercise professional judgment to solve a complex accounting problem.

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The skills of the future

About a year ago, with the expansion of the use of artificial intelligence and the automation of more and more tasks, KPMG managers began to examine what skills would be required of junior employees in the future.

They defined six categories. One of them is technical skills, meaning knowledge in audit and taxation. The other five are critical thinking, flexibility, business understanding, interpersonal skills, and professional conduct.

To develop the new training program, the firm's managers examined the tasks that a junior employee might perform, such as checking the outputs of AI agents or presenting findings to his superiors.

Accounting firms tend to recruit large cohorts of employees for entry-level positions every year because many of them leave within the first few years. KPMG, the smallest of the four large accounting firms, employs about 35,000 employees in the US, and this summer it has 2,100 interns, 950 of them in the audit division. More than 90% of the interns in the audit and assurance divisions receive a full-time job offer.

In the past, the audit profession was based on the assumption that "you are simply assigned to a project, and within five years, by the time you advance to a manager position, you have already accumulated enough experience to be ready," says Sherry Schuster, a senior manager at KPMG who led the redesign of the training program. "We can no longer afford to assume that this will happen on its own."

"KPMG Mission"

Far from the company's headquarters in New York lies the Lakehouse complex of KPMG, a closed complex that includes 800 single hotel rooms, a full-service dining room, a wine bar, a sports bar, and an 18-hole mini-golf course. An Uber driver who arrived to pick up passengers from the place called it "Fort Knox."

Firms providing professional services have so many seminars and training sessions outside the office that such a facility is not unusual. Deloitte, for example, has a leadership center near Dallas, which it calls "Deloitte University." Instead of flying employees from across the country for meetings and training and development events, KPMG chose to direct the budget to bringing them to the Lakehouse complex in Orlando.

This summer, the students were divided into four "houses," each named after one of the KPMG founders. Throughout the eight weeks of the internship, they accumulated points for their "house" through challenges designed to strengthen the training they underwent.

The interns participated for two hours at the Lakehouse complex in the "KPMG Mission" - a "scavenger hunt" game that included eight tasks, including distinguishing between facts and false information created by AI, as well as matching the firm's AI tools to the most appropriate use. Points were awarded for speed and creativity.

A meeting with one of the partners earned Brandon Padilla 15 points earlier this summer. The 22-year-old student from Northern Illinois University spent his internship at the KPMG offices in Chicago, where he worked on projects for clients and on side tasks designed to challenge him to use the firm's AI tools. According to him, these tasks helped him and other interns stay productive, and also prevented them from bothering more senior employees when they had a lull in their workload.

Padilla, who defines himself as an introvert by nature, says he enjoyed the meeting at the Lakehouse complex that dealt with creating professional connections, a skill that the firm says will be even more important for young employees.

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A changing pyramid model

As more tasks become automated, interaction with clients becomes even more important. According to the firm's managers, more opportunities are opening up for young employees to explain to clients the work that was performed and the issues that arise from it.

Firms providing professional services have relied over the years on a pyramid model, in which many junior employees pass their work to more senior employees, until it reaches the partners, who were promoted over the years based on their seniority.

According to Tim Walsh, Chairman and CEO of KPMG in the US, this model may change. Walsh began his path at the firm as an intern in 1992, and in his first role, he was in charge of the photocopier. He does not know what the workforce will look like in the future, but believes that KPMG is moving towards a promotion model based more on skills, where young employees may even bypass employees more senior than them thanks to their technology skills.

However, judgment remains a decisive factor. "We won't just hire new employees and let them work independently," Walsh said. "This also means that supervision, training, and mentoring will be even more important."

Competitors have also made adjustments to their training programs. PwC will require its junior employees this year to undergo practical training in artificial intelligence. If an employee uses an AI agent to perform a task, a message will appear before him asking how he plans to check the output.

Ernst & Young offers an accounting simulation in a game format on college and university campuses, allowing internship candidates to test their decision-making skills and receive feedback. Next year, the firm is expected to launch an expanded internship program. Deloitte gives interns access to training agents, which provide short training sessions on demand.

"Much harder than I thought"

Ryan, the student from Miami University, initially thought she would finish her studies on a pre-med track. She changed direction because she wanted a career based more on teamwork. KPMG is her first internship.

"I think we were all sure it would be technical, technical, technical, and entering numbers into Excel," she says about the auditor role.

During the logo design challenge, when the instructions changed every three minutes, Ryan thought to herself: this is much harder than I thought. Looking back, she realized that the goal is to learn how to communicate well with the people around you, even when the lack of clarity is frustrating.

Throughout the summer, she improved her skills in the field of AI. She used it to locate errors in Excel and even built her own AI agent.

"Just as we need to feel comfortable in uncomfortable situations," says Ryan, "so we need to feel discomfort in the face of the uncertainty regarding how AI will affect our jobs in the future."