New research on how top-performing firms structure their workforce points to a shift accounting professionals can’t afford to ignore.
The accounting profession isn’t becoming simpler as AI and flexible workforce models take hold. It’s becoming layered, and the professionals who understand that shift early will have a real advantage over those who wait for it to become obvious.
Recent Accounting Today industry research shows top-performing accounting and advisory firms are moving away from a single, one-size-fits-all staffing model. Instead, they’re building layered workforces, a core team, a flexible layer of specialist talent, and increasingly, a layer of AI-driven tools handling the work that used to eat the most hours. Firms that adopt this structure report meaningfully stronger results across profitability, staff utilization, and their ability to scale without proportional hiring.
Makosi works with firms navigating exactly this shift, helping them build the layered workforce models driving those results. But the same shift firms are responding to at a structural level is reshaping something more personal for the accountants inside it: what a strong career actually looks like from here.
“As AI and new ways of working move deeper into the profession, the fundamentals don’t move with them,” says Milton Segal, Executive: Standards at the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA). “Technical competence, ethics, trust and professional judgement remain what the profession is built on. What’s evolving is how accountants need to combine these attributes and apply them to their work that increasingly involves technology they didn’t train on a decade ago.”
What this means for accountants
The traditional accounting career path assumed one layer: technical competence, built over years, in a single firm, on a fairly predictable track. That layer still matters. It’s the foundation. But firms building layered workforces are increasingly looking for people who bring more than that foundation alone.
A second layer is specialization or agility, a genuine depth in a specific area (EBP, technical accounting, a particular industry) or the flexibility to move between engagements, markets, and client types. A third, newer layer is AI fluency, not just tolerance of the tools, but the judgment to know when to rely on them and when a human call is the only one that matters.
Accountants who build all three layers, not just the first one, are the ones best positioned for the opportunities this shift is creating: international engagements, specialist project work, and roles that didn’t exist in a traditional, single-track career path. Makosi’s own consultants are already living this, moving across international client engagements, specialist assignments, and AI-supported workflows earlier in their careers than a traditional path would typically allow.
How to position for it
The professionals gaining ground right now aren’t waiting for their firm to hand them exposure to this shift. They’re building toward it. That means seeking out work that stretches beyond core technical tasks earlier in a career, getting genuinely comfortable working alongside AI tools rather than avoiding them, and staying open to the kind of flexible, cross-border engagements that used to only come later in a career, if at all.
“The accountants who do well over the next decade won’t be the ones who waited to be told what skills mattered,” says Tanya Grota, Chief Financial and People Officer at Makosi. “They’ll be the ones who noticed the shift early and started building toward it, technical depth, comfort with new tools, and the flexibility to work across borders and industries. None of that happens by accident. It’s a choice people make earlier than they think they need to.”
The accountants who treat this as a career strategy question now, rather than something to figure out later, are the ones who’ll have the most options when the profession fully catches up to where it’s already heading.
