Grant Thornton CEO on investing in accounting’s next gen

The century-old tax and accounting firm Grant Thornton is bucking industry hiring trends, and investing heavily in tech and AI along the way.

While some worry about AI’s impacts on the accounting and finance talent pipeline, Grant Thornton is boosting its graduate recruitment numbers by 30% in the UK this year, according to HR Chief magazine. CEO Jim Peko told CFO Brew the company is also increasing its technology spend thanks to access to capital stemming from a 2024 private equity deal.

The deal with New Mountain Capital changed the firm’s governance, Peko said, allowing Grant Thornton to move quicker on certain decisions and have “access to capital that we didn’t have access to before.”

“In 2025 alone,” Peko said, “we closed 15 M&A transactions, and committed to invest $1 billion in tech and AI over the next few years.” He continued, “we see it as AI and people working together, not AI replacing people.”

“Having said that, I think the ratio of tech to people changes…if we were to double the size of the firm, I don’t necessarily expect us to double the size of our employee complement. I don’t have the exact formula on that right now, but maybe our employee base grows by 25% or 30% when revenue is doubling,” he added.

A Gartner survey from October mirrors Peko’s thoughts, finding that only a fifth of the 321 customer service and support leaders surveyed had cut headcounts due to AI. Likewise, a new study based on a survey of more than 700 corporate executives by the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Richmond in late 2025 found that AI usage across organizations of all sizes did not meaningfully affect their firms’ total number of employees or costs in 2025, “nor do business executives anticipate shrinking employment and costs” in 2026.

At Grant Thornton, implementing AI into peoples’ workflows ensures that “less experienced, less tenured people are now able to focus on more of the value-add work, as opposed to the repetitive-type tasks that, frankly, we’ve been outsourcing offshore,” Peko said.

Peko wants to build a pipeline for future GT partners at its platform called Grant Thornton Advisors, a group of 20 firms that offer non-attest services such as CFO advisory, technology consulting, and transaction services.

“One of the things that I’m really excited about that’s a true differentiator for the platform is for our highest performing people, we’re getting equity in their hands, so they’re starting to get a bit of a taste of what an equity return looks like. Now, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and we’re not playing the lotto where you get some shares in equity, and all of a sudden you become wealthy. It’s a long road, but it is really important to get that equity in the hands of our less experienced people, so that they get an understanding of what that is, and that we create the career path for them to ultimately become partners.”