Audit Has Too Few Workers, Not Too Many. A Unicorn CEO Explains

Audit firms have two to two and a half times more open jobs than people to fill them, according to Vidya Peters, CEO of Amsterdam-based audit and finance automation company DataSnipper — a unicorn since its $100 million Series B in 2024.

"This is a profession that is actually in crisis mode," Peters told Fortune last week, days after DataSnipper launched Alwin, its agentic automation platform. "At any given time, there are two to two and a half x as many jobs open than there are people to do those jobs." The profession, she added, has the highest attrition rates. "It's very cyclical, like it's got these huge peaks, and it's really hard to sustain a role."

How deep is the staffing hole?

Federal data quantifies it. About 1.96 million Americans worked as accountants and auditors in 2019, per Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. By 2022 that had fallen to about 1.65 million — a loss of more than 300,000 workers, which the Wall Street Journal reported as a 17% decline in two years. The workforce recovered to roughly 1.77 million in 2025, still about 200,000 short of pre-pandemic levels.

The pipeline has not refilled. Schools awarded 55,152 accounting bachelor's and master's degrees in 2023-24, down 6.6% year over year, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Enrollment rose 12.4% in spring 2025, the highest total since 2020. Meanwhile the BLS projects about 115,300 openings for accountants and auditors every year through 2035.

Hannah Seal, a partner at Index Ventures, which led DataSnipper's Series B, wrote last September that audit faces "an untenable equation: growing demand and shrinking supply," with new entrants who "often burn out under the heavy manual workload."

What about AI killing these jobs?

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicted in February that most tasks involving "sitting down at a computer," accounting among them, will be fully automated within a year to 18 months. Peters is skeptical. "I'm sorry, but you can't expect a great brand if that's your headline," she said. "And they said it 18 months ago, and here we are."

She flagged her own bias, too: "Whenever you ask this question, pay attention to who's answering the question." Everyone discussing AI, she said, is "speaking of AI from their own biased, vested interest perspective." Hers, she conceded, is the audit and finance professionals she serves.

Unlike legal services or copywriting, where AI is hitting roughly balanced labor markets, Peters argues audit AI arrives in one already broken. "AI can be a huge boon on the limited talent that's actually in the job," she said, helping "people who do more with less."

Who controls the AI?

Peters separates two oversight roles. Building and approving an agent should be restricted to experienced auditors who can review it "like you would review a junior auditor." Reviewing output is broader work. "You may not have to design the agent," she said. "Everyone can be a human in the loop."

The stakes are regulatory. "The regulator is not going to care what tech tools you use," she said. "They're going to want to know that a certified auditor… has reviewed and approved."

DataSnipper's own data complicates the trust picture. In its 2025 survey, 78% of audit and finance professionals said they trusted AI, up from 74% in 2023. This year, per its 2026 AI in Audit report, trust "fell sharply" to 55% — "the most dramatic shift" in four years of the survey. Some 73% call AI essential, but only 13% of organizations have integrated it into real workflows.

Her answer is traceability. Alwin ties every output to source documents via "Snips." "If we say it's 101 euros and 23 cents, you can mouse over it and you can see exactly where we got that number from," she said. "It's great, I'll take the efficiency of AI. But what's really, really important to me is that the people we serve can stand behind the work of the AI."

What kind of company backs this view?

DataSnipper, which the founders themselves hired Peters to run in June 2023, has never raised primary capital. Its $100 million Series B, led by Index Ventures in 2024 at a $1 billion valuation, was secondary — founders and employees selling shares. "We're very proud to be profitable and have financially funded our own growth," Peters said.

The company counts the Big Four, RSM, BDO, Baker Tilly, Grant Thornton and Crowe among customers, plus Fortune 500 finance teams including Barclays, Netflix, Mastercard, Morgan Stanley and Hilton, and public bodies such as the U.K. National Audit Office. It serves over 3,000 organizations across 175 countries and now ships product updates every workday, up from one or two a year when Peters joined.

She frames both company and product around one principle: not letting speed outrun control. "It's been really important to me to strike the balance between growth and accountability," she said — because she doesn't want "to wake up in the morning thinking, here are a group of auditors that actually are being pulled out by the SEC because the agent went rogue and exposed data."