EY urges junior consultants into the office, and the reason it gives is AI
EY is encouraging its junior consultants back into the office, and the argument it is making is not the familiar one about culture or productivity. Speaking to the Financial Times in an interview published on 27 August 2026, Sayeh Ghanbari, managing partner of EY’s UK and Ireland consulting practice, said she had seen a change in recent years where “people have set up their lives to be at home a lot”, and that this “is just not the route to success in the world of AI”.
EY has made no formal change to its working policy. Partners have instead been asked to remind younger consultants that time spent together in the office supports their development. The reasoning across the sector is that AI is levelling out the technical analysis firms can produce, so the differentiator becomes how staff present that work and handle clients – skills the firms argue are learned in person from more experienced colleagues.
Why this matters
If you are early in your career and working remotely, this is the argument you will now have to answer. It is harder to counter than the productivity one, because it is about what you are learning rather than what you are producing, and it lands hardest on the people with least bargaining power. Two practical responses: make your development visible by asking for named mentoring, structured feedback and client exposure in writing, and treat “come in more” requests as negotiable on specifics – which days, with whom, and for what – rather than as a blanket expectation. Note also that this is encouragement from partners, not a policy with a mandated day count, which means there is room to shape what it means in practice.
Context
The AI-skills framing is new; the direction is not. European professional services and banking have been tightening attendance through 2026, and the same week brought the counter-example: Airbus suspended its plan to move white-collar staff to four office days after strikes across Spain, France and the United Kingdom. Research published in Harvard Business Review in August, analysing 50 million European job postings, found that remote roles skew hiring towards experienced candidates and away from recent graduates – which gives the “juniors need the office” argument some empirical support, whatever one makes of the conclusion drawn from it.
What to watch
Whether EY converts encouragement into a mandated day count, and whether the other Big Four firms adopt the same AI-based reasoning. For a wider view of which European employers are holding the hybrid line, see our remote-first companies in Europe guide.