According to Heather Townsend, Founder of the Accountants’ Growth Club and author of How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life, skillsets in accounting firms are facing a perfect storm.

Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) has moved past the experimental stage, particularly at mature firms, changing the nature of juniors’ roles. A resurgent fintech sector is drawing people away from accountancy and while older professionals are retiring, not as many new recruits are signing up.

In parallel, Townsend notes: “For two decades, people have pronounced compliance work dead. But if we look at where we’re going – with Making Tax Digital for income tax imminent in the UK and Belgium moving towards real-time VAT – the compliance burden is actually rising, not falling.”

Against that backdrop, she says, the most in-demand skills and roles for firms this year are:

1. ESG expertise

In light of updates to the UK Corporate Governance Code and requirements of the International Sustainability Standards Board, Townsend says, clients must now report on their environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks with the same rigor as their revenue.

“The traditional audit role was about pounds and pence. ESG is about scientific data and quality of assessment,” she says.

2. Storytelling

The cloud era has presented clients with real-time dashboards – and a data deluge.

“Clients may be able to see the numbers, but they often lack insight,” Townsend says. “They don’t need to know what happened – AI will tell them that. What they really need to know is why it happened – and what to do next.”

Many junior-to-mid-level accountancy roles have shifted from production to interpretation, Townsend notes. “That requires a skill for telling stories with numbers; explaining what’s going on and helping clients understand the root causes of issues in their business.”

3. Empathy

“In the digital-first world, accounts production is managed by technology. So, our premium product or service becomes human connection,” Townsend says.

“Our role is now far more about spending time with clients, so they feel understood, looked after, valued and seen. Accountants will increasingly represent the human face of their firms. That means they must be able to dial into their clients’ anxieties and goals.”

4. The cloud specialist

In the quest for comprehensive enterprise platforms, clients are looking for pieces of cloud software that they can stitch together. For example, having a shopping cart, invoicing system, point-of-sale data and accounting, and VAT functions that will all talk to each other.

“Clients tend to call their accountants first with cloud problems,” Townsend says. “I believe there’s a real opportunity here for us to help clients build their cloud enterprise platforms with the right components, to ensure the systems are robust and seamless.”

5. Systems integration

“This is a new skill that is moving at speed, and is very much intwined with AI ,” Townsend says. “Essentially, the challenge is how to build an AI agent that will help a client do things more effectively in its financial processes, or within your own firm, to reduce the amount of time spent on compliance?”

6. The tax technologist

Tax has ceased to be a purely accounting and legal domain, Townsend stresses. It is now a data engineering discipline.

At multinational level, companies must ingest and process millions of transaction lines to calculate their tax liability. As such, manual spreadsheets are not just inefficient – they are actively noncompliant.

With that in mind, Townsend notes, the tax technologist is a bridge between a firm’s tax and IT departments.

“This person understands, and knows how to manipulate, big data – and will use the data models they build to help clients anticipate trends,” she says.

“In addition, they have a role in business development, because they can spot R&D or transfer-pricing opportunities before the relevant departments on the client’s side even know they’re there.”

7. A firm grasp of geopolitics

“You may wonder what geopolitics has to do with your small accounting practice,” Townsend says. “But we’re living in a time of very unstable political systems, particularly if we look at the US.

“Tariffs and tariff changes have enormous impacts on mergers and acquisition activity and supply chain costs, so accountants must understand far more about global risks. What do they mean for your SME client who, say, sources materials from China and has lots of clients in the US?”