On September 15, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that KPMG is removing about 200 positions from its UK advisory business. Roles in AI and cybersecurity are named among those affected.
That works out to roughly 4% of the advisory practice’s permanent headcount. The cuts are subject to consultation; affected staff are expected to leave in October.
Three rounds, one year
This isn’t KPMG’s first cut of 2026.
In March, Bloomberg reported the firm was removing more than 500 roles across audit and advisory: 440 assistant-manager positions in audit, 120 more in advisory. In July, City AM reported roughly 200 jobs cut from KPMG UK’s group corporate services division (HR, corporate affairs, marketing, tech, and procurement), about 10% of that unit. Now, in September, the data and technology arm of advisory takes the hit, with AI and cyber teams explicitly named.
Add it up and KPMG UK’s headcount has gone from more than 17,000 at its pandemic peak, to 16,600 a year ago, to 15,800 now.
The line that explains it
KPMG’s stated reason: “As our market evolves, we are adapting where we are focusing and how we are set up to make sure we have the right skills in place to best serve our clients. To respond to these market dynamics combined with low levels of attrition, we are proposing reductions in some of our advisory client-facing teams and will support our colleagues throughout this process.”
Low attrition is doing the real work in that sentence. KPMG’s advisory revenue fell 3% in the year to September 2025. Demand contracted, but headcount didn’t shrink on its own fast enough through people quitting, so the firm cut it directly. EY, PwC, and Deloitte all reported similar contractions in their consulting businesses over the same stretch. The cuts sit inside a cost-control push led by KPMG UK senior partner Jon Holt.
Here’s the detail that doesn’t fit the usual script. This isn’t a support-function cut. Big Four firms cut executive assistants back in May, PwC around 600 and McKinsey around 200, because internal AI assistants had made the role redundant. This is different. The people on this list are the ones KPMG sells to clients as its AI transformation practice.
The firm selling AI just cut the people who sell it
The easy narrative is “AI took the consulting jobs.” KPMG’s September round tells a different story.
Advisory revenue didn’t shrink because AI finished the work. It shrank because corporate clients bought less consulting this cycle, full stop. KPMG didn’t treat its AI headcount as protected. It cut there first, for a plain reason: the cost of that headcount gets measured against the revenue line it sits on, and the label on the org chart, whether it reads “AI,” “cyber,” or “audit,” doesn’t change the math.
Hackett Group’s August earnings make the contrast sharper. Hackett sells AI transformation consulting for a living, ran that transformation on itself for a year, cut 194 people, and ended with revenue per consultant essentially flat: $56,154 to $56,400. What it banked was payroll, not productivity. KPMG’s version is more direct still: it didn’t even reach for the AI-efficiency framing. The stated reason is headcount math, not AI output.
Zoom out further and the pattern compounds. KPMG cut 100 US audit partners in April after a voluntary retirement scheme fell short and the firm forced people out involuntarily. Over five months, KPMG has moved from partner-level cuts, to back-office cuts, to cuts inside the advisory practice’s technical core, each round landing closer to the work that generates revenue.
What this means if you work in this
If your job title says AI, data, or cybersecurity inside a Big Four advisory practice, the signal here is specific: the label doesn’t buy you protection. What determines whether your seat survives is the revenue trajectory of the business line you sit inside, not the firm’s public AI narrative.
KPMG has cut three times this year: audit partners, corporate back office, and now advisory’s AI and cyber teams. Each round has cut closer to the center of the business. Advisory revenue is down across the Big Four this year. That makes this KPMG’s list today, and probably not only KPMG’s list by year-end.
