EY is turning its internships into yearlong residencies as AI changes entry-level work

Ah, marvellous. EY, the Big Four firm that has spent the last two years telling every client that AI will transform everything, has finally found a way to transform the price of graduate labour. Its new "Career Residency" for assurance interns extends the traditional eight-week summer stint into an 8-to-12-month paid slog, done remotely, with "coaching" and only the promise that participants might — might — get a full-time offer at the end. So instead of a job, young accountants now receive a vocational gap year with a laptop and a mentor.

The corporate framing is exquisite. "Residency" conjures doctors saving lives in teaching hospitals, not a 22-year-old ticking off audit checklists in a bedroom while AI reviews the same spreadsheets. The unspoken truth is that assurance work is precisely the kind of structured, rule-following drudgery that large language models excel at, and EY knows it. By stretching internships to nearly a year, the firm gets a flexible, remote, paid-but-provisional workforce that can be quietly not offered a job if the AI-powered tools make even fewer humans necessary. The 'coaching' will presumably cover how to sound enthusiastic about your own obsolescence. "Potentially joining full-time" is doing heroic legwork in that sentence.

This is what "AI changes entry-level work" means in practice: not a universal basic income, not retraining into glorious new roles, but a longer queue, a longer trial, and an even longer wait for the privilege of a permanent contract. The graduates who dutifully complete their residency will discover that the residency is not the path to career — it is the career, compressed into a probationary limbo. Cheerio, and please enjoy your coach-led feedback session while the algorithm schedules it into a slot you never chose.