The unicorn CEO betting her industry’s AI crisis isn’t the one you think

Most of the fear about AI and knowledge work is that there won’t be enough jobs. Vidya Peters has the opposite problem, and she thinks almost nobody covering AI is asking about it.

“This is a profession that is actually in crisis mode,” said Peters, CEO of DataSnipper, an Amsterdam-based audit and finance automation company that reached unicorn status in 2024. In an interview with Fortune last week, days after DataSnipper launched Alwin, its agentic automation platform, Peters was asked what she made of the current AI discourse. She answered with a staffing problem. “At any given time, there are two to two and a half x as many jobs open than there are people to do those jobs,” she said. The profession has the highest attrition rates, she added. It’s “very cyclical, like it’s got these huge peaks, and it’s really hard to sustain a role.”

For two years, Peters has been making the case in public that audit faces a crisis of scarcity. The general AI-jobs conversation has mostly missed it. Her argument pushes against a much louder story from Silicon Valley, where AI leaders keep warning that white-collar work is about to be automated. Most recently, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicted in February that most tasks involving “sitting down at a computer,” accounting among them, will be fully automated within a year to 18 months. Peters has a line for that. “I’m sorry, but you can’t expect a great brand if that’s your headline,” she said. “And they said it 18 months ago, and here we are.”

She also offered a warning, aimed at herself as much as anyone. “Whenever you ask this question, pay attention to who’s answering the question,” she said. Everyone talking about AI is “speaking of AI from their own biased, vested interest perspective.” She says her own bias is the customers she serves: audit and finance professionals, “where nobody thanks them for doing the job quickly… but they’re definitely held accountable if they get it wrong.”

The numbers behind the crisis

Federal data shows how deep the hole got. About 1.96 million Americans worked as accountants and auditors in 2019, according to annual averages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey. By 2022, that number had fallen to about 1.65 million, a loss of more than 300,000 workers. The Wall Street Journal reported the exodus at the time as a 17% decline in two years. The workforce has since partly recovered, to about 1.77 million in 2025, but that still leaves the profession roughly 200,000 people short of where it stood before the pandemic.

The pipeline hasn’t refilled it. Schools awarded 55,152 accounting bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the 2023-24 academic year, down 6.6% from the year before, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. There are early signs of a turn: enrollment in accounting programs rose........

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