As we close the book on 2025, the narrative around Artificial Intelligence has shifted perceptibly. If 2023 was the year of awe and 2024 the year of experimentation, then 2025 has been the year of consequences.

We have moved beyond the initial hype around generative AI. We are now seeing the structural reshaping of the workplace – a shift that is revolutionary for efficiency but alarming for the architecture of our careers. In my strategic Green Paper released today, ‘The Broken Ladder’, We argue that we are witnessing the hollowing out of the UK professional services sector.

The Data: The Ladder is Gone

Throughout last year I have observed a smoke trail of anxiety. Now, we sense the fire. The data from the 2025 recruitment cycle is clear: the Junior Cull is happening.

• Big Four Contraction: Graduate intake at firms like KPMG has dropped by 29%. This isn’t just a hiring freeze; it is a structural redesign.
• The Revenue Decoupling: We are seeing a decoupling of revenue from headcount. AI is automating the training wheels tasks – document review, drafting, transaction ticking – that historically forged professional judgment.

The Human Impact: Cognitive Deskilling

The financials look efficient – saving an estimated 190 billable hours per lawyer annually – but the human cost is mounting.

The silent anxiety of early 2025 has morphed into what King’s College London now terms ‘cognitive deskilling’. By bypassing the ‘desirable difficulty’ of rote work, junior professionals are failing to develop the intuition required to spot when the machine is wrong.

We are creating a verification gap. As the FRC has warned, if juniors don’t do the manual work, they never develop the auditor’s instinct. We are buying the engines but forgetting to train the pilots, leading to a surge in liability risks – evidenced by the $67.4 billion cost of AI hallucinations globally last year.

From Pyramid to Diamond

Nowhere is this more acute than in the ‘pyramid’ professions: Law, Management Consulting, and Accountancy. The pyramid is being forcibly reshaped into a diamond: we are keeping the experts and the mid-level specialists, but we are automating the apprentices.

If we automate the apprenticeship, where will the next generation of Partners come from? We are mortgaging our future competency for today’s efficiency.

A Shift in Focus: 2026 and the Simulated Training Environment

Observing this ‘Broken Ladder’ has profoundly changed the mission. The urgent problem for 2026 is not “How do I install Copilot?” but “How do I survive the transition?”.

Consequently, my advisory work is evolving. I am spending less time on vendor selection and more time helping firms act as a ‘transition architect’.

We must build new rungs to replace the ones we destroyed. This means:

1. Simulated Training Environments: Creating ‘flight simulators’ for juniors to learn on simulated transactions, since live grunt work no longer exists.
2. The Apprenticeship of Oversight: Teaching juniors how to audit AI, shifting from doing to verifying.
3. Epistemic Confidence: Helping leaders trust their judgment in an age of black box algorithms.

Looking to 2026: Human Preservation

As we head into the new year, the message to the business community is this: the technology is inevitable, but the competence crisis is optional.

2026 cannot just be another year of digital transformation. It must be the year of human preservation. We need to value the human premium – judgment, empathy, and ethics – and build the structures to protect it.

The ladder may be broken, but we can build a bridge.