EY UK's AI and data sales rose 46% while total fees rose 2%

EY's UK firm booked £3.86bn in fee income for the financial year ending 3 July 2026. That's up 2%, in what the firm called a challenging market. Inside that modest number sits a much faster one: sales of AI and data projects in the UK rose 46% year on year, according to results EY published on 27 October.

The two figures measure different things, so dividing one by the other tells you nothing. Still, the gap is worth a look from anyone who hires advisers. The service line most buyers would expect AI projects to run through, Consulting, shrank 3% over the same twelve months. The growth came from somewhere else in the firm.

Strategy, tax and audit carried the year

EY-Parthenon, the strategy and transactions arm, grew UK revenue 6%. Tax and Assurance each added 3%. Consulting revenue fell 3%, a decrease EY's release described as marginal. By sector, Consumer & Health grew 8% and Technology, Media and Telecommunications grew 5%, the firm's two strongest industries in the UK.

EY also said client demand for AI-enabled transformation work was strong across all areas of its business. Its UK website describes the firm as four integrated service lines (Assurance, Consulting, EY-Parthenon Strategy and Transactions, and Tax) run by multidisciplinary teams. Read together, those two statements explain how a shrinking Consulting line and a fast-rising AI sales figure can sit in the same results without contradiction.

The global numbers argue against reading too much into the UK Consulting figure, though. Global Consulting rose 4.4% to US$17.4bn. EY-Parthenon was again the fastest grower, up 7.4% to US$6.8bn, followed by Tax at 6.0% (US$13.8bn) and Assurance at 3.0% (US$18.9bn).

Those lines added up to global revenue of US$57bn for EY's 2026 financial year, up 4.7% in local currency, with growth in every service line and region, CFOtech Asia reported. EY's five-year compound annual growth rate was 8.3%. Because the global rates are stated in local currency, the comparison with the UK is directional. Even so, the direction is clear: the UK grew more slowly than the firm as a whole, and its Consulting line moved the opposite way to Consulting worldwide.

CFOtech Asia saw the results as a sign that large advisory and accounting groups want to convert demand for AI projects into wider transformation work, while audit and tax keep growing. The UK breakdown matches that reading closely. The established lines all grew, but AI and data sales grew faster than any of them.

What a 46% figure can and cannot tell a buyer

The UK number counts sales of AI and data projects. The global number CFOtech Asia reported is different: EY said revenue from AI services grew 49% during its 2026 financial year. One measures work won and the other measures work billed, and the two cover different geographies and slightly different definitions of AI work.

EY explains the demand the same way in both markets. In the UK release, the firm said organisations are moving past AI experiments toward measurable business outcomes and productivity gains. Global Chair and CEO Janet Truncale, quoted in CFOtech Asia's coverage, described clients redesigning how their businesses operate rather than running isolated trials, and pointed to work that pairs technology with industry knowledge and human judgement.

For a procurement director or CIO comparing AI transformation bids, if AI propositions can reach a company through its tax adviser, its deal team or its auditor's wider firm, the useful thing to check is which practice delivers the work and what industry experience that team has. The logo on the cover sheet tells you less.

Where a 2% year went: profit, pay and people

A 2% top line did not mean 2% everywhere else. Distributable profits before tax rose to £702m in FY26 from £679m in FY25, a gain of about 3%. Average distributable profit per partner climbed more than 10%, from £787,000 to £870,000. Profit per partner rising faster than the profit pool itself would mean the pool was shared among fewer partners on average.

EY hired 2,300 people across the UK, made more than 3,700 internal promotions and progressions, raised average pay 5.2% and increased its total bonus pool by more than 25%, its largest variable pay pool to date. Globally, CFOtech Asia reported US$448m spent on training, with total formal learning up to 26.6 million hours from 24.6 million.

The release ties the bonus increase directly to how the year went. Anna Anthony, EY's UK & Ireland Regional Managing Partner, described the figures as "a solid set of results in a challenging market." She said the firm had kept growing even as it spent heavily on people and technology to set up growth in the years ahead. With the bonus pool up more than 25% and fees up 2%, the numbers show where the firm put the gap between revenue growth and profit growth.

EY's own rollout as a reference point

EY made Microsoft 365 Copilot available to every UK employee during FY26 and logged more than 1.2 million hours of learning and development across its UK workforce. Globally, CFOtech Asia reported that 203,000 EY employees held Copilot licences at the end of the financial year. That figure has since risen to 381,000. For CIOs weighing a full-workforce licence against a pilot group, EY did not publish usage or productivity data alongside the rollout.

The licence count nearly doubled after the year closed. That suggests the global rollout was still picking up speed when the UK firm opened Copilot to all of its people, rather than winding down.

EY has built enterprise-scale agentic AI into its global audit platform. The firm says the tools have modernised audit processes on 160,000 engagements and are helping 130,000 professionals raise both risk assessment and audit quality. According to CFOtech Asia, EY says its Responsible AI framework controls how these tools are bought and deployed. A CFO or audit committee chair whose company uses EY as auditor can take a specific question into the next planning meeting: how does the agentic tooling change risk assessment on our audit, and which steps does a named person still own?

The audit rollout is one part of what EY calls a multiyear overhaul of its audit services, with 130,000 assurance professionals now using AI tools. Agentic AI is also being introduced into internal workflows and client services. The firm says it keeps investing in AI-ready data and governance frameworks, and in newer fields including physical AI and quantum computing.

The skills figures cover more than hours logged. The US$448m training budget paid for programmes in AI, leadership and other technical skills. Through the EY Badges scheme, staff have earned more than 40,000 AI learning accreditations, and another 104,000 are underway. EY also says that, across the combined enterprise customer bases of Coursera and Udemy, its AI-skilled population is growing fastest. Accreditations are easier to verify than hours, so a buyer could fairly ask whether the named people on a bid hold one.

Microsoft engineers on the project team

The way work gets delivered is changing too. EY and Microsoft widened their alliance through a US$1bn initiative that pairs Microsoft Forward Deployed Engineers with EY industry professionals to co-develop secure, industry-specific AI solutions. According to CFOtech Asia, EY's revenue tied to alliance partners has grown at a 34% compound annual rate over the past decade. During the financial year, NVIDIA also named EY its Global System Integrator Tech Innovation Partner of the Year.

EY said Copilot now gives it access to leading frontier AI models, and that it had broadened its partner work in AI-ready data, agentic AI, physical AI and business transformation. Anthony put the Microsoft deal among the UK firm's headline moves of the year, calling it "a significant evolution of our global Alliance with Microsoft."

Pairing a vendor's platform with EY's industry teams predates the Microsoft deal. In May 2022, EY Ireland's consulting business formed an alliance with FINEOS, a core-systems provider for life, accident and health insurers, covering work from consulting to on-site execution and integration. Matthias Loh, EY's global sponsor for that alliance, said carriers pairing the platform with EY's consulting capabilities "are likely to increase the success rate and the total value they achieve." The Microsoft initiative goes further on one point: it explicitly puts the vendor's engineers on the team to co-develop the solution.

The joint model gives buyers a contracting question that standard advisory terms may not answer: which people are EY's, which are Microsoft's, and who owns an industry-specific solution the two co-develop. Those answers belong in the statement of work.

If UK Consulting stays flat while AI and data sales keep climbing, that would support the reading here: EY's AI business in the UK is spread across the whole firm, not concentrated in one practice.