Cinven‑backed accounting group joins a wider pivot to offshoring and AI as professional services recut costs and workflows.

Grant Thornton has cut the bulk of its UK‑based secretaries, with most of the work to be performed from India, according to people at the firm. The decision, made in mid‑August, marks one of the sharpest back‑office restructurings by a major professional services group this year and underscores how administrative jobs are being reassigned either to lower‑cost locations or to software built on artificial intelligence.

Partners and affected employees say the changes touch “almost all” secretarial roles spread across regional offices and the London HQ. While some duties will be absorbed by fee‑earning teams and centralised hubs, most will move to the firm’s established operations in India. Internally, managers have framed the shift as a response to evolving client demand and firm‑wide productivity targets, rather than as a direct consequence of the company’s new ownership structure.

Grant Thornton’s UK business closed a landmark deal this spring that brought in private equity investor Cinven as a majority shareholder—a rare step in the traditionally partner‑owned accounting sector. People familiar with this week’s changes, however, say the cuts were signed off by UK management to streamline support ratios and speed up a multiyear plan to automate routine tasks such as diary management, travel booking and document preparation.

In a statement to staff seen by this newspaper, senior leaders said the move would ‘modernise support, reduce duplication and free up investment for client‑facing teams.’ The firm has also retained outside advisers to review operations and benchmark service levels as responsibilities transfer across time zones. Employees affected by the changes have been offered redeployment where feasible, along with redundancy terms in line with UK policy, according to the same internal communication.

The immediate catalyst is cost. Secretarial support is among the most labour‑intensive elements of an audit and advisory practice after fee‑earners themselves. Relocating work to India—where the firm already runs sizeable shared‑services and managed‑services capabilities—can cut wage bills materially while extending coverage windows for partners and directors who travel frequently. In parallel, the firm has been rolling out generative‑AI tools for first‑draft emails, meeting notes, formatting and templated reports, reducing the volume of typing and scheduling traditionally handled by personal assistants.

Executives close to the decision maintain that service quality will be protected by standardised playbooks and stricter service‑level agreements. Teams in India will handle pooled tasks—calendar triage, data entry, expense processing and document production—while specialist, confidential assignments remain with senior staff in the UK. Pilot programmes earlier in the year tested follow‑the‑sun workflows for busy reporting seasons, with UK teams handing over to colleagues in India at the end of the day and picking up formatted materials by morning.

Still, the optics are sensitive. The cuts come only months after the Cinven deal completed, a transaction that helped fund technology upgrades and, according to public disclosures, delivered strong partner pay for the prior financial year. Management insists the restructuring is about ‘how’ the firm works, not a short‑term earnings manoeuvre for its new investor. But the juxtaposition—partner dividends on one side and staff exits on the other—has prompted debate about whether external capital is accelerating a shift long expected in the mid‑tier audit market.

Grant Thornton is far from alone. Across the UK and Europe, professional services groups are consolidating administrative functions into global business services centres or outsourcing them to specialist providers. The playbook is familiar: centralise, digitise and automate; then reserve local support for high‑touch client work and regulated processes. What’s new in 2025 is the pace at which AI is being embedded into these hubs: meeting‑assistant bots for action logs, speech‑to‑text tools for minutes and reviews, and document co‑pilots that can assemble appendices from standard templates.

For affected employees, the transition is bruising. Secretarial roles have been a traditional on‑ramp to careers in operations and marketing within large partnerships. Several regional offices now face the loss of an experienced cadre who kept the machinery of pitches, partner diaries and travel running. Staff representatives say the firm should invest more in retraining for project coordination, client onboarding and risk‑management support—roles that still require local knowledge and judgement.

Client impact is expected to be mixed in the short term. Executives argue that pooled support can speed up document turnaround and give partners access to a broader roster of assistance during peak periods. Sceptics counter that partners and senior managers will spend more time doing their own scheduling and approvals while the new model beds in. The bigger risk, say consultants who advise the sector, is that poor change management erodes morale and inadvertently slows engagements during quarter‑end crunches.

India’s role is central to the redesign. Grant Thornton’s Indian member firm has long sold finance‑and‑accounting outsourcing and other managed services to external clients. In the new model, a portion of those capabilities is being re‑tooled for internal use by the UK practice—effectively turning a client‑facing engine into a captive shared‑services platform. India’s deep bench of accounting graduates and process experts enables rapid scaling, while the UK team retains oversight of client‑sensitive matters.

Data protection is another watchpoint. Moving administrative work across borders raises questions about the handling of client information, especially in regulated audits. People familiar with the plans say the firm is segmenting workloads, using anonymised data where possible and limiting access to client systems. The firm has also briefed teams on documentation standards aimed at preserving audit trails when AI‑assisted tools are used to generate or summarise content.

The industry context is a market recalibrating after a stop‑start few years. After a surge of deal work and pandemic‑era consulting, UK advisory pipelines cooled before stabilising this spring. Partners are now pushing for higher utilisation and lower overheads ahead of what they hope will be a busier capital‑markets cycle in 2026. Within that equation, secretarial support—essential but non‑billable—is the first place many firms are standardising and, where possible, automating.

There are hints of what comes next. Some partners expect the pooled model to expand beyond secretarial work into broader ‘business support’ pods that marry people and software: proposal assembly, research pulls from subscription databases, compliance checklists and even first‑pass technical memos built by AI and reviewed by junior staff. If it works, routine processes will be faster and cheaper; if not, dissatisfied teams will rebuild shadow systems around trusted associates.

For now, the message from leadership is continuity for clients and a promise of investment in ‘people plus technology.’ That includes more training for AI literacy, tighter workflow tooling and clearer service menus for fee‑earners so that tasks are routed to the right place first time. The question that will preoccupy the rest of the sector is whether this marks a one‑off correction—or the new baseline for how mid‑market firms are run.

Either way, the decision at Grant Thornton is a bellwether. It signals that the economics of professional services are tilting further towards platform models that blend offshoring, automation and specialist hubs. For UK office workers whose skills sit closest to administrative process, the safest hedge is to climb the value chain—into project coordination, client delivery and risk roles where judgement, not just speed, sets the standard.

Sources: company communications and people familiar with the decision; contemporaneous reporting in the Financial Times and UK trade press; public disclosures on the Cinven investment and Grant Thornton’s India operations.