Most of what gets written about AI and accountancy comes from within a firm or a finance function; it focuses on how various AI tools perform the tasks at hand. We in Barden sit in a different seat. Every day, we are talking with employers across practice, industry and financial services about who they want to hire and why, and with talent about how they’re trying to stand out. That gives us a slightly different vantage point on what AI is actually changing: it’s less about the tools themselves and more about how hiring decisions are made.
Job specs are changing
A year or two ago, “AI” barely featured in a job description for a newly qualified role. Now, it’s increasingly common to see references to comfort with automation tools, ERP-embedded AI features, or simply “adaptability to new technology” written into specs for roles at all levels. Employers aren’t expecting people to be AI experts, but they are starting to screen out people who seem resistant to change. In reality, this means the question “how have you used AI or automation in your current role?” is coming up in more first-round interviews than it was even twelve months ago, across practice and industry alike.
The changing shape of roles
While demand for good, recently qualified accountants remains strong, the responsibilities of some entry- to mid-level roles have changed. Employers are increasingly looking for accountants who can own a process end-to-end, including the technology that supports it, rather than accountants whose value is concentrated in high volumes of manual, repetitive work. That’s a meaningful shift in what “junior” work looks like, and it means the roles available to you at 0-5 years PQE may ask more of you earlier than they once did.
This lines up with what the data shows about where AI is actually adding the most value in accounting right now: document processing, transaction categorisation and real-time reconciliation are all areas where the tools genuinely save time, and recent industry research puts the proportion of accountants already using AI to draft client communications at close to two-thirds. The same research is just as clear about where it falls short: complex judgement calls, ethical accountability, and the commercial reasoning that sits behind a number rather than in it remain firmly human territory. That is precisely the gap employers are hiring for. AI can compress the mechanical end of the job, but it cannot yet replace interpretation, which is why people who understand both sides of that split are the ones getting noticed.
What actually differentiates people
We are increasingly hearing from clients that they can tell the difference between a person who has genuinely used AI tools to work more efficiently and one who name-drops “ChatGPT” or “Claude” without being able to speak to it. People who stand out are the ones who can give a specific, credible example: a process they streamlined, a tool they introduced, a way they used AI to free up time for higher-value work. Vague enthusiasm doesn’t land well with hiring managers, and neither does the opposite: people who dismiss AI outright are increasingly read as inflexible.
How to position yourself
If you’re a qualified accountant and thinking about your next move, a few things are worth doing now. Keep a mental note, or better yet a written one, of specific instances where you’ve used AI or automation tools in your role, so you have real examples ready for interview rather than generic claims. Don’t overstate it either; if a hiring manager probes and finds the substance isn’t there, it works against you. Beyond the tools themselves, lean into the skills that consistently emerge as gaps in the market: communication, stakeholder management, and commercial awareness. These are the qualities employers repeatedly tell us they can’t easily test for on paper, and they’re exactly the skills that remain valuable regardless of how the technology develops. As mentioned already, we’re increasingly seeing questions like “tell me about a time you used AI to solve a problem or improve a process” find their way into competency-based interviews.
Adaptability is the Advantage
From where we sit, AI isn’t reshaping the accountancy job market by replacing roles wholesale. It’s reshaping it by changing what “strong” looks like at the recently qualified level, and by giving employers a new, fairly reliable signal for adaptability. The people who are thriving in this market aren’t necessarily the most technical or the most tech-savvy; they’re the ones who can show, concretely, that they’ve moved with the profession rather than waiting to see what happens. That’s advice that would have held true before AI, and it still does now, just with a new example to point to.
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