EY Wants You Back at the Office. AI Will Replace You There.

In July 2026, EY will require its US tax employees to spend at least 12 days each month in an office or at a client site. This marks a sharp departure from the voluntary hybrid arrangements that defined the post-pandemic consulting world. The firm's leadership has been explicit about the reasoning: remote work, they argue, stunts the growth of junior staff who need in-person mentorship to develop the soft skills that matter most in an AI-saturated economy.

Sayeh Ghanbari, EY's UK head of consulting, put it bluntly: "This change we've seen in the last few years where people have set up their lives to be … at home a lot is just not the route to success in the world of AI." The argument is seductive. As artificial intelligence commodifies technical labor, the story goes, what separates the valuable human from the algorithm is presence, relationship-building, client rapport. You need to be in the room. You need to absorb unspoken cues. You need proximity to the partners who will teach you how to navigate the political architecture of enterprise sales.

There is one problem with this narrative, and it is substantial: EY is simultaneously automating away the exact work that junior consultants have historically done to develop these skills in the first place.

The consulting model has always relied on a pyramid. Partners design strategy. Managers oversee projects. Associates and analysts produce the deliverables—the 100-page reports, the deck after deck of analysis, the financial models, the data aggregation. This was grunt work, but it was also the training ground. You learned by doing. You learned by failing at low stakes. You learned by watching how your manager took your sloppy analysis and turned it into client-ready prose.

But the consulting economy that EY and its peers are building now does not work that way. The company's own statement of priorities makes this clear: consultants are expected to deliver "working prototypes, algorithms, dashboards, and AI tools alongside strategic advice." The deliverable is no longer a report. It is automated intelligence embedded in systems that clients can iterate on themselves. The work is fundamentally different—and it requires radically fewer hands to produce.

This is where the return-to-office mandate reveals its true function. It is not really about mentorship. It is about control and continuity during a period of profound uncertainty about what consulting firms actually do anymore. If junior staff are in the office, they are easier to manage during the transition. If they are observable, their declining utility becomes a problem to be solved through restructuring rather than a problem that forces uncomfortable questions about the business model itself.

The data hints at the dissonance. While 60 percent of consultants express a preference for more in-person time, nearly half worry that increased remote working harms staff development. This suggests that many people in the industry sense that something does not add up. You can want more office time and still recognize that the skills being taught there are increasingly misaligned with the work that actually exists.

There is also a class element that should not go unexamined. Partners and senior managers benefit from junior staff being visible and available. The hourly billing model that the Big Four are built on—the model that generates partner profit—depends on having bodies that can be allocated to client work, whether or not that work is genuinely valuable. Remote workers are harder to bill. Remote workers are harder to justify keeping on the payroll when their output can be replicated by a machine learning model trained on three months of their work product.

EY's mandate may boost in-office attendance numbers. It may create the appearance of organizational coherence at a moment when consulting firms face genuine existential questions about their value proposition. But it will not change the underlying reality: the skills junior consultants develop in an office are becoming obsolete at precisely the speed that AI is accelerating. Being in the room does not protect you from that. Neither does any amount of mentorship from a partner who is also terrified about what automation means for their own relevance.

The paradox resolves itself easily once you stop taking the narrative at face value. The return-to-office mandate was never really about developing human skills. It is about preserving an organizational structure that made sense before machines could do the work. EY is not calling junior staff back because it believes in the transformative power of physical proximity. It is calling them back because the moment they disappear is the moment the consultancy has to admit that most of them will not be needed at all.