• PwC has canceled its annual end-of-internship trip to Disney World.
• The trip to Florida was a celebration for interns being converted to full-time staff.
• The Big Four firm said it continued to make "significant investments" in early-talent programs.

So much for a magical ending.

PwC has canceled the signature finale to its summer internship program: a multi-day trip to Disney World.

Managers at the Big Four firm told members of its 2026 summer intern class they wouldn't be ending their internships with a trip to Orlando, according to three PwC interns who spoke to Business Insider.

PwC confirmed that the traditional trip — a perk that has been running for all but five of the last 20 years — had been canceled.

The multi-day event, which was for interns who received full-time job offers, was typically held in mid-August to celebrate the end of the summer internship. The event featured entertainment, keynote speeches, and career-development panels, as well as free food and accommodation, and access to the Disney World Resort.

A PwC spokesperson told Business Insider that while the celebration, known as Impact, was no longer happening, the firm continued to make "significant investments" in its early-talent programs.

One PwC tax intern told Business Insider they had been told their internship would end with a team dinner at an Italian restaurant.

PwC's spokesperson said the company was increasingly investing in strengthening learning and building connections within individual teams, said the spokesperson.

"As part of that approach, we're intentionally focusing our programs on experiences that provide more time with colleagues, greater exposure to clients, and stronger opportunities to build relationships within the offices and teams where interns begin their careers," the spokesperson said.

PwC still hosts a number of other events and talent initiatives, some of which take place in Orlando and include access to Disney World. Destination CPA, for example, is a three-day networking event held in Orlando that introduces incoming accounting interns to the firm.

The interns who spoke to Business Insider had mixed views about the cancellation.

One was disappointed, saying that although PwC had organized some happy hours and office-based events, they were "nothing compared to what Impact would have been."

"Honestly, I don't mind!" another said. "Many current interns went a year and a half ago during Destination CPA."

A changing talent strategy

In the past year, PwC has made other internal changes aimed at more collaborative, team-focused learning.

In February, it launched the "Learning Collective," a workplace training initiative that encourages more learning outside standard courses, such as bringing team members to meetings or having teams discuss what they've learned that week with each other.

Since fall 2025, PwC has reduced the number of locations where entry-level consultants can start their careers, from 72 to 13, to bring junior consultants closer together during their first years at the firm.

The Americas was PwC's fastest-growing region in its most recent financial year, but globally and in North America, the firm fell behind its Big Four competitors in terms of growth last year.

PwC also reduced its global head count by 5,600 during the 2025 financial year, reversing an earlier strategy of expanding its workforce.

Big Four internships

Elaborate intern experiences are common among the Big Four professional services firms. They serve partly as recruitment tools, helping firms foster a sense of community and encouraging promising candidates to accept full-time offers.

They can be a costly investment — every summer, the Big Four take on several thousand summer interns across their accounting and advisory divisions.

KPMG invites summer interns to Lakehouse, its $450 million training facility in Florida, where they learn while enjoying an 18-hole putting green, gym facilities, and a constant stream of free food. Deloitte operates a similar facility in Texas, called the Deloitte University.

The growing use of AI is prompting professional-services firms to reconsider how they recruit and train junior staff. KPMG US has shifted its audit intern training to focus less on technical aspects of the profession and more on critical thinking, data analysis, and drawing conclusions.

As the technology increasingly performs some of the data-heavy tasks traditionally assigned to entry-level workers, it's also raising questions about the future role of graduate hires.

PwC plans to reduce its hiring of entry-level workers in the US by a third over the next three years, Business Insider reported in August. An internal presentation linked the decision to "transformation efforts, the impact of AI, and further AC integration." The firm has also reduced entry-level recruitment in the UK.

• Oracle laid off staff in March. A new filing shows its global head count fell by 21,000 over the last year.
• Costs associated with restructuring increased by $1.5 billion over the past year, up 391%.
• Oracle has been ramping up data spending during the AI boom.

Oracle's head count has been shrinking as it made layoffs to cut costs — and now there's a number behind its reduction.

A filing published Monday showed that its global workforce declined by 21,000 between May 2025 and May 2026. The number includes both attrition and layoffs.

Oracle employed around 141,000 employees worldwide as of May 31, 2026, the filing said.

Compared with the numbers reported in its 2025 filing, the company shed 9,000 jobs in the US and 12,000 jobs internationally.

Restructuring and other expenses — which consist of costs for employee severance, contract termination, and other exit activity — increased by 391% from $374 million to about $1.8 billion over the last year, Oracle said in the filing.

Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.

In March, the company began laying off staff but did not confirm the scale of the cuts.

The notification email sent to the laid-off employees, which Business Insider exclusively obtained, said the decision to eliminate roles was made "after careful consideration of Oracle's current business needs" and was part of "broader organizational change."

According to LinkedIn posts from laid-off employees, the cuts affected staff across Oracle Health, Sales, Cloud, Customer Success, and NetSuite.

The reduction in head count comes as Oracle invests heavily in data center infrastructure while looking for ways to rein in costs. Oracle's stock is down about 15% over the last year.

In March, Oracle executives told investors not to worry about its significant data center spending because the company is "very, very good" at cost-cutting.

In January, Business Insider reported that the company was struggling to find financing for Stargate, its $500 billion data center initiative with OpenAI. In February, Oracle announced a $50 billion debt raise to help fund its infrastructure buildout.

Across the tech industry, major companies have been reducing their workforces. Many bosses have cited AI in their layoff notifications.

In January, Amazon said it would slash about 16,000 corporate roles, months after cutting 14,000 employees. Meta axed around 8,000 staffers in May, and Dell's recent 10-K filing showed that employee numbers have fallen by 36,000 over the last three years, a 27% decline in head count.

• AI agents perform tasks autonomously, but many fear they'll override their controls.
• Business Insider spoke to KPMG's Trusted AI lead, Sam Gloede, about how it is deploying agents safely.
• Kill switches should be a last resort, Gloede said.

AI agents are here, and sci-fi prophecies of robots taking over have never felt more real.

No longer just companionable chatbots, AI agents — capable of acting, reasoning, and completing complex tasks — are being deployed at scale in 2026.

But as these autonomous systems become embedded in workflows, so too does a sense of unease about their unpredictability and the risks they pose to businesses.

Organizations are preparing to scale agentic systems enterprise-wide, but clients remain wary of agents, Sam Gloede, Trusted AI leader at KPMG, told Business Insider.

"One of the biggest concerns is probably how do you make sure that you allow them to have the autonomy to do the valuable things we need them to do, but to stop them from going wild or taking over."

KPMG has created a multifaceted framework to protect against worst-case scenarios for both clients and its own employees, said Gloede.

"A robust set of controls is really important," she said. Businesses need to clearly define what their agents are allowed to do and ensure monitoring systems can detect when they stray beyond those boundaries. Agents should only interact with the systems and data they strictly need, limiting the potential impact of errors, said Gloede.

Every KPMG agent has its own unique identifier and a systems card, allowing the firm to log and monitor actions, trace decision-making, and track interactions with other agents, Gloede told Business Insider. Oversight is handled through an AI operations center staffed by both agents and human monitors, she added.

Red-teaming, running simulated risk scenarios, is another key step in stress-testing systems before things go wrong, added Gloede.

Altogether, she said, these measures ensure agents operate within defined boundaries — without constant manual intervention.

"It's not about scrutinising people's behaviours for performance and alignment," said Gloede. "It's the ability to just always be monitoring your technology ecosystem."

Build in a kill switch — but don't expect to use it

Beyond technical safeguards, human oversight remains "critically important," Gloede said. If an agent begins to drift from its intended role, there must be a "kill switch or a fallback option where you can turn them off."

That may sound at odds with the promise of autonomy that agents are meant to deliver, one of the key selling points for business leaders. But the level of oversight depends on the risk, said Gloede.

Lower-stakes tasks, like booking meeting rooms or drafting emails, can be automated once reliability is proven. For high-risk scenarios, which could affect financial outcomes or require access to sensitive data, a "human in the loop" is necessary, she said.

If businesses put multiple other controls in place, it's unlikely that they'll need to fire off a kill switch, Gloede added.

Agents going rogue is a major fear for corporations

Gloede's comments come at a time when fears about Terminator-esque scenarios are very real.

Earlier this year, the launch of Moltbook, a Reddit-like social network where AI agents can post and interact with each other, offered a glimpse of how strange things could get.

Within hours of the site going live, one agent announced a new cryptocurrency and said, "The humans can watch. Or they can participate. But they don't get to decide anymore." Other posts have seen agents questioning their consciousness and creating religions.

While Moltbook feels like an internet fever dream, the stakes in the corporate world are higher.

Earlier this month, Amazon's AI coding tool contributed to an error that resulted in nearly 120,000 lost orders and 1.6 million website errors for the delivery giant.

Last week, McKinsey, a global consulting firm that helps companies implement AI safely, suffered an embarrassing PR hit when a cybersecurity firm said it had used an AI agent to hack into Lilli, McKinsey's in-house AI platform. The firm is positioning itself as an AI expert, and in January, CEO Bob Sternfels said that of its 60,000 employees, 25,000 are AI agents.

"McKinsey was recently alerted to a vulnerability related to our internal AI tool, Lilli, by a security researcher. We promptly confirmed the vulnerability and fixed the issue within hours," a McKinsey spokesperson told Business Insider.

The firm's investigation, supported by a third-party forensics firm, found no evidence that client data or client confidential information was accessed, the spokesperson added.

The best protection from an agent going rogue is a multifaceted approach — the technical controls, human oversight, and technology to observe and govern, KPMG's Gloede told Business Insider.

"I really do believe that if you are intentional and establish your agentic ecosystem with that as the foundation, I don't believe there would be a situation where they would go out of control," she said.

• Demarre Johnson, 23, appeared in a viral photo shoot published by Interview magazine last week.
• PwC on Friday confirmed Johnson had left the company, saying he departed in mid-February.
• A person familiar with the matter told Business Insider his exit wasn't related to the magazine pictorial.

One of the "finest boys in finance" — whose splashy magazine spread last week was the talk of Wall Street — is no longer with his firm.

In a statement to Business Insider, PwC confirmed that former associate Demarre Johnson is "no longer an employee and left the firm in mid-February."

Johnson went viral last week after he and three junior bankers were featured in designer clothing in an Interview magazine photo shoot published March 4. A person familiar with the matter said his departure was not related to his magazine appearance.

The 23-year-old, who spoke with Business Insider twice after the magazine story, didn't comment when a reporter reached him on Friday.

The Babson College graduate talked to Business Insider last week about being chosen for the spread, saying he knew it would make headlines because "controversy sells."

"My initial reaction was, 'Oh, they're going to clown us because we think we're pretty,'" Johnson said. "That's exactly what happened."

The photo shoot generated instant discourse among Wall Street insiders who took to social media to vent about the stereotypes they said it portrayed and the unofficial rules it broke — including not outshining your bosses.

Bankers buzzed about whether the participants — who also worked at Goldman Sachs and Barclays — got approval from their employers before going in front of the cameras. Goldman said that "media relations did not approve these interviews." The other firms didn't comment at the time.

Johnson, who has a vibrant social media presence, said on Monday that he's been careful about social media posts he's made about his job. "If I built the multibillion-dollar bank business, I would hate if one of my associates formed my company's image with one video," he told Business Insider.

Other participants in the shoot have avoided the spotlight since its release, but Johnson reposted feedback about the story on his social channels.

"I'm viral on twitter," he said in one post, with four crying emojis.