The death of the junior analyst?

Every few years, the finance industry declares the end of something fundamental. (Think: spreadsheets. FP&A. The close.) 

Now, it's the junior analyst.

The argument goes something like this. AI and automation are taking over entry-level work. And, if the work disappears, so do the roles. Sorry, recent college graduates!

“I think we’re going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks… so, white-collar work… most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”

Mustafa Suleyman, CEO, Microsoft AI

It's a compelling story. But it's also a dramatic oversimplification. Workflows are being redesigned around tools that didn’t exist five years ago. That means the work junior analysts used to do – variance analysis, scenario modeling, reconciliations, and so on – is increasingly handled by platforms.

The problem is that this same work was also how junior analysts traditionally learned the business.

Finance leaders have seen versions of this before. When the work changes faster than the role, development pathways break. That’s the real issue this moment calls us to confront. It’s not about whether junior analysts still matter, but whether we’re intentionally redesigning the role for professionals who are growing into a field shaped by automation.

Automation doesn’t eliminate the need to learn

At Pigment, we’ve seen firsthand how automation is changing finance work. Tasks like variance analysis, scenario modeling, and forecasting cycles are faster, more repeatable, and more accessible than ever. Finance teams are automating business-as-usual work while improving the visibility of their financial data.

But those “business-as-usual” tasks have traditionally been the way junior analysts learn how revenue actually behaves, how costs move under pressure, and how assumptions can break. It’s the arena where intuition comes to life and true judgment is built.

As more of this work becomes automated, a gap is opening between what junior staff used to do and what businesses now expect of them. If that layer disappears without a corresponding redesign of the role, early-career team members may never develop the human capabilities and experience-based expertise required to monitor, question, and ultimately trust AI-driven outputs.

When learning drops off, talent pipelines break

Hiring strong finance talent is difficult. Building a pipeline that consistently develops that talent is even harder.

Consider what happens when junior analysts are hired into roles that no longer teach them how the business works. The work moves faster, the tools get smarter, but the learning curve flattens. That means early-career team members are expected to operate with judgment that they have not yet had the chance to develop.

When growth stalls, engagement often follows. And disengagement shows up quickly in higher turnover, shallow benches, and teams that struggle to promote from within.

This pattern is not new. Finance has always evolved alongside new tools and systems. What is new is the pace. When role design can’t keep up, development becomes accidental rather than intentional.

That’s why slowing down automation isn’t the answer. Instead, we must redesign entry-level roles with development in mind. If junior analysts are no longer learning through volume and repetition, they need new pathways to build context, judgment, and confidence. Without that, automation can never work as it's intended, which is to amplify and support existing human knowledge and abilities.

The future junior analyst looks more like an apprentice

The future of FP&A requires re-designing processes around what junior analysts actually need to learn.

That means pairing juniors directly with senior team members not just to execute tasks, but to watch how decisions get made, how tradeoffs get discussed, and how a CFO can frame the same set of numbers three different ways depending on the audience.

It means getting juniors into the business earlier. Let them sit in on marketing planning meetings, listen to how the sales team debates forecasts, and see what happens when product strategy runs into budget reality. You can't teach that kind of context in a vacuum.

It also means actively teaching skills we used to assume people would pick up on their own – like storytelling and cross-functional communication. With platforms handling more of the calculation automatically, human value becomes about interpretation and influence. Finance teams must train for that from day one.

While AI is acting as a catalyst here, this is all long overdue.

The unavoidable truth

The "death of the junior analyst" isn't inevitable, but the death of outdated role design probably is.

We've known for a long time that early-career roles were overloaded with manual work and under-supported in terms of actual development. 

The companies that get this redesign right will have stronger teams, deeper benches, and finance leaders who understand both the numbers and the business realities behind them.