Job cuts at Big Four firms fuel worker burnout

20 May 2026

Professional Services Editor, City AM

Job cuts at professional services firms are resulting in overworked staff, but the pressures – combined with increased reliance on AI – risk damaging firms’ reputations through mistakes, writes Maria Ward-Brennan.

The professional services industry, especially the Big Four giants, has faced its fair share of job cuts, with thousands of roles laid off in the UK over the last couple of years after a long period of booming growth.

But this uncertainty is starting to cause havoc with office culture, as staff watch co-workers leave with their brown boxes and wonder when the next round might leave them heading for the exit, too.

As City AM revealed earlier this month , KPMG has been facing an internal comms meltdown after complaints of poor communication during a ‘mismanaged’ redundancy round.

Staff are facing anxieties about job security while at the same time they are taking on the work of those deemed redundant by the firms, resulting in long working hours. One source in the audit department at one of the Big Four told City AM that “some staff are expected to work extremely unhealthy hours” as a result of the changes.

“I know that some for a week straight have been expected to work 6am – 1am. Staff have been in tears due to the workload, most fear this will get worse due to the redundancies as clearly the work load is too much already,” they added.

Pay rises and promotions have stalled at some (but by no means all) of the sector’s giants over the last couple of years. Another source at a consultancy firm told City AM that their firm paused pay rises last year and that, so far this year, those rises have been delayed.

The incentive to work long hours is starting to dwindle among some staff, especially as workloads from redundant staff are being pushed onto their lap.

This reactive quick-cut strategy at firms struggling to grasp the profitability problem risks resulting in overworked, stressed staff who can make mistakes.

And this comes at a time when mistakes can be very costly to a brand’s reputation.

Mistakes are increasingly costly

Over the last few weeks, more and more stories have emerged about ‘AI hallucinations’: from a courtroom in New York involving an elite law firm to a major study by EY released with apparent AI-generated hallucinations and fake footnotes.

While Deloitte had to issue a partial refund to the Australian federal government after a report it issued contained several errors caused by AI.

Professional services firms are finding themselves in a weird predicament: needing to draft in AI for client work at a time when clients are questioning the quality of AI-generated work.

At a time when businesses’ pockets are feeling lighter, the first place firms are looking to cut costs is with external sources. As some firms quote clients hundreds of pounds per hour, the quality bar has been raised.

But pushing out work that hasn’t been double-checked, which clients have paid a lot of money for, will have a knock-on effect for players in a sector facing stiff competition.