A big thank you to ACCA for publishing Global Talent Trends 2026. It is now the largest annual survey of careers, jobs and working life in our profession — 11,389 respondents across 160 countries, with fieldwork running from October 2025 to February 2026. Producing something at that scale, year after year, is a real service to finance and accountancy, and it gives the rest of us a dataset we can actually plan around.
This is not a commentary piece. It is a set of highlights — the numbers that stood out to me on the question ACCA's own Head of Skills, Sectors and Technology, Jamie Lyon, singled out as "one of the standout issues this year": people's concerns around AI. I have let the data lead, and I have kept my own voice to a minimum. Where a figure deserves a charity-finance lens, I have added one line and moved on.
Adoption is now the baseline, not the story
Before the worries, it helps to see where the profession actually is. On ACCA's numbers, AI is no longer emerging — it is established.
- 52% of respondents now say they regularly use AI tools in their role.
- 82% feel confident in their ability to learn and apply AI-related skills — almost unchanged from 81% in 2025. That stability is worth pausing on: confidence in learning AI is not the problem.
- 43% say their employer is providing AI upskilling opportunities — a sharp rise from 32% a year earlier, and the fastest single-year jump in the survey series.
- 31% say their organisation is currently deploying AI agents to support finance and accounting work — so agentic AI, for all the noise, is still a minority activity.
One charity-finance note: by sector, the not-for-profit and charity world sits at 43% regular AI use — level with the public sector and below the Big Four (66%), mid-tier firms (63%) and shared services (56%). Charities are not outliers here; they are in the middle of the field, but not leading it.
The concern data
Here is the finding I read twice. Adoption is rising and worry is rising at the same time.
- 51% of respondents say they are worried about the potential impact of AI on their jobs — up from 44% in 2025. Familiarity, on this evidence, is not breeding comfort.
- "Jobs being replaced by technology" has now ranked as the second-highest workplace fear in ACCA's index for four consecutive years — sitting just behind inflation.
- Younger professionals remain the most concerned generation — a pattern ACCA has now recorded across four editions of the survey. The report's own reading is that this reflects uncertainty about entry-level and early-career roles, where routine, automatable tasks are most concentrated.
AI in recruitment — and a leadership paradox
This is the part most coverage will miss, because it runs the opposite way to the usual story.
- 48% of respondents have reservations about AI algorithms being used in hiring.
- It is not junior staff who are most sceptical. 54% of board-level and senior executive respondents are not confident in AI-based hiring — rising to 57% across the wider leadership group. The people with the most hiring authority are among the least convinced.
- The candidates' two biggest concerns, each cited by around 29% of respondents, are the loss of human touch and the fear that AI discriminates based on CV data, with transparency, "gaming" the process, facial/tone analysis and data privacy making up the rest.
- ACCA cites LinkedIn data that 93% of recruiters plan to increase their use of AI in hiring by 2026 — which sets that scepticism on a direct collision course with practice. ACCA calls the result an "AI arms race".
In the not-for-profit and charity sector, only 29% are confident in AI for recruitment against 63% who are not — the highest scepticism of any sector in the report.
If you are hiring finance staff in this sector, that is a quiet warning: heavy-handed algorithmic screening may put off the very people you are trying to attract.
The quieter risk: shadow AI
Two figures from an ACCA webinar poll connected to the research caught my eye, because they are about governance rather than fear:
- 73% of respondents said their employer provides access to an AI chatbot tool (ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude).
- 37% said they use a personal or private AI chatbot subscription to help with work — outside any employer control. ACCA flags this as a real data-leakage risk, and it is. For a charity finance team handling donor, beneficiary and payroll data, that is a governance question that deserves a one-page answer before it becomes an incident.
Where AI worry meets wellbeing
ACCA is careful to frame this as correlation, not causation, and so will I:
- 54% say their mental health suffers because of work pressures, up slightly from 52% in 2025.
- Respondents who are concerned about AI's impact on their role score worse across every mental health indicator (59% report their mental health suffers, against 45% of those without such concerns).
ACCA's own conclusion is the one I would underline: AI anxiety is highest among people who already feel overwhelmed or insecure, and it tends to fall where employers invest in upskilling. The report even names the trap to avoid — what it calls "agency decay", where over-reliance on AI erodes people's confidence to make their own calls. The data points away from clamping down and towards clear communication, deliberate training and careful workflow design.
The data also has a hopeful side
It would be a poor reading of this report to stop at the worries.
- 69% of respondents want their future finance roles to make a difference to social impact, and 63% want roles that help meet the environmental and climate challenge.
- 62% of not-for-profit and charity respondents say their current role already contributes to social impact — among the highest of any sector.
- 75% of all respondents say an organisation's reputation on social and human rights is a key factor in deciding where to work — rising to 82% among Gen Z.
- On the technology itself, ACCA's framing is reassuring and, I think, right: AI is best understood as a new productivity layer for the profession, not a replacement for it. The report draws the analogy with the move from manual ledgers to spreadsheets — Excel did not remove the need for accountants; it reshaped the skills mix and raised expectations. As ACCA puts it, "accountability does not change."
For charity finance teams, that last point matters most. The mission you already have is, on this data, a genuine advantage in attracting talent — and the way to meet rising AI concern is not to avoid the technology but to introduce it openly, with human sign-off and a clear audit trail intact.
A closing thought
The honest takeaway from Global Talent Trends 2026 is that two things are true at once: AI use is up, confidence in learning it is high — and worry about its impact has gone up as well. That tension is real, and it deserves a real response rather than reassurance.
At AI Finance Office, my work with charity finance teams is to create and deploy automations that are transparent, auditable and properly governed — precisely because the concerns in this data are legitimate. AI that a Finance Director can stand behind, with the human judgement left firmly in human hands, is the version of this that earns trust.
My thanks again to ACCA for the research. The full Global Talent Trends 2026 report is free to download at accaglobal.com — I would particularly recommend Section 7 to anyone thinking about AI governance in their own finance team. And if you would like to talk through what that looks like in practice, I am always happy to.
Sources: all figures are drawn from ACCA, Global Talent Trends 2026 (11,389 respondents, 160 countries; fieldwork Oct 2025–Feb 2026). The 73% / 37% chatbot figures are from an ACCA webinar poll connected to the research rather than the main survey; the productivity figure referenced in the report is US Real-Time Population Survey data cited by ACCA. Global Talent Trends 2026 (PDF).