Accounting uses AI almost everywhere for routine entry and drafting; fees, junior training and the sign-off are where it changes the business.

A US firm priced agent-run assessments 30 to 50 percent below human rates, software took the unbilled chasing, and EU disclosure duties went live.

In August WPP conceded AI will cut its prices, the ad platforms began writing account reports themselves, and ChatGPT ads reached Latin America and Europe.

Since July, AI agents moved inside control systems operators already run, Iberdrola claimed nearly 500, and the EU pushed its compliance deadline to 2027.

Europe's hiring-AI delay is law while disclosure took effect, US screening is near-universal, and the CV no longer separates candidates.

AI's frontier wins are real but cluster where answers are cheap to check; human judgment holds precisely where no cheap test can score it.

The AI rehiring wave indicts sequencing, not capability: firms cut the people who make automation work before redesigning the job around it.

A 2026 survey shows most employers that cut jobs for AI have rehired those roles, many at a net loss.

Employers are rehiring the workers AI replaced, Washington turned model releases into a government-gated event, and the model-makers began selling rivals' models as a service.

The market wiped $250B off Google over two departures; read right, it priced human judgment as the scarcest asset in AI — the operator's moat.

Apple chose to rent its model rather than build it, JPMorgan ran autonomous agents through its regulated core, and $12 billion backed physical-engineering AI.

In May 2026 Anthropic, OpenAI and Intuit pushed AI agents into accounting tools and bank data, automating the first-pass work firms can no longer staff.

In May 2026 a Stanford bias study, Altman's reversal on AI job losses, and the Mobley v. Workday case put AI hiring tools on notice.

OpenAI's CEO walked back AI jobs, Cognition's agent reached Goldman and NASA, Google funded the router layer, open-weight safety fell in ten minutes.

Markets stopped rewarding AI layoffs, Google triggered a model price war, Washington shelved AI oversight, and Europe's energy costs priced it out of the buildout.

Microsoft data shows developer employment up, Apple opens iOS to rival models, Anthropic ships a banking-analyst bundle, Nvidia hits $40B in equity bets.

Consensus is right that Jevons holds in the aggregate; missing that the expansion accrues at the top — hire juniors now, while nobody else is.