KPMG’s new CEO joined as an intern 33 years ago. Now he wants to lure Gen Z back with a new office outfitted with moody lounges and a barista bar

“It’s funny,” Walsh said in an interview with Fortune. “I stood at that copy machine all week making copies of loan files for audit evidence. When I look at what our people do today — and the kind of skills they bring — it’s completely transformed.”

That transformation is both personal and symbolic. Walsh, who took over as KPMG’s U.S. chair and CEO in July, began as an intern and climbed every rung of the firm’s hierarchy. His path from copy room to corner office has become part of how he talks about opportunity and staying power in an era when most new grads are expected to job-hop their way through a tight labor market. 

Yet even as Walsh champions the value of entry-level work and promises to keep hiring younger people — “I still think the internship is the most important part of what we do” — the definition of “junior” is shifting fast.

Inside KPMG’s consulting arm, new hires are being trained to manage teams of AI agents to help build decks or spreadsheets. The firm’s global AI workforce lead, Niale Cleobury, told Business Insider that KPMG wants “juniors to become managers of agents,” delegating grunt work like data analysis and research to automated assistants to free them up to become more involved in more advanced, strategic decisions. 

That modernization push extends beyond workflows to the workplace itself. Now he’s betting that the effort KPMG is putting into its new headquarters in Manhattan, complete with “war-mapping” strategy rooms, skyline lounges, and even what one executive called “MTV-style” confession rooms for clients to record reflections after big projects, will provide the next generation with that same sense of opportunity. 

KPMG has consolidated three legacy Manhattan offices — 345 Park Avenue, 560 Lexington Ave, and 1350 Avenue of the Americas — into one 450,000-square-foot tower, a footprint reduction of approximately 40%.Walsh said he sees it as key to getting the next intern-turned-executive on a similar trajectory to him. 

“I really do believe that someone can start here as an intern, like I did, and build a long-term career,” he said. “It’s still possible, maybe even more so now, because there are so many ways to grow inside one firm.”

Glossy new building

The gleaming new building comprises 12 floors at Two Manhattan West, the final skyscraper in Brookfield’s eight-acre development between Moynihan Train Hall and Hudson Yards. It arrives at a delicate moment for white-collar work. 

Five years after the pandemic scattered office life, corporate America is still in the process of negotiating its terms of return. 

“Hybrid creep” is quietly pushing people back — 63% of U.S. workers are now fully in-office, according to Owl Labs data — even as surveys show that rigid mandates tank morale and drive attrition.

Walsh and his leadership team insist their version is voluntary, not punitive. 

“We already have minimums in place, and those are working really just fine,” he said. “I’m more worried about being oversold in this space than people not coming in.”

The firm expects most professionals to be in roughly three days a week, varying by business. Audit and advisory staff often spend long stretches at client sites, while partners and internal teams flow through on staggered schedules.

“People want to come in,” Vanessa Scaglione, the head of Real Estate Services, said. “People want to be seen and heard and valued.” 

Scaglione led a Fortune reporter on a private tour of the office ahead of their doors opening Nov. 5. There, a group of KPMG staffers followed and sometimes interjected with their own thoughts on the building, while workers fastened the last screws on light bulbs and organized plants strewn around the office. 

A smaller footprint, a bigger statement

The 12 floors are split into four New York-inspired “neighborhoods” — Financial District/ Downtown Manhattan, Midtown, Upper Manhattan, and Central Park — connected by monumental staircases. There’s a barista bar called Common Ground with views of Lower Manhattan; an employee lounge, The Manhattan, designed to feel “more like your living room than an office”; and an open terrace with skyline seating for impromptu meetings. A digital booking app replaces assigned seating, and early demand is so high it’s already “sold out,” Walsh said. 

The centerpiece is Ignition, the firm’s design-thinking lab that doubles as a client theater. There, executives simulate everything from AI rollouts to supply-chain shocks using wall-sized, LED touchscreens and movable furniture. Brian Miske, who heads Ignition nationally, called it a “thinking accelerator.”

“People get more done in one day here than they would in 30 days anywhere else,” he said. “It’s designed and engineered to maximize space for thinking as well as work.”

Miske, however, admitted that even for leaders like him, the office isn’t a five-day affair. 

“We travel, we’re with clients all the time,” he said. “Some weeks we’re here, some weeks we’re in Orlando or California: this isn’t meant to be full every day. It’s meant to be buzzy and busy when it matters.”

That sentiment captures KPMG’s bet: that offices no longer need to be constantly filled — only consistently valuable. 

“We designed to be hybrid,” Scaglione explained, as she pointed to a small room fitted with large cameras that connect in-person employees into large apparitions on their remote worker colleagues’ screens. 

The design of the building is embedded with that philosophy. Each “neighborhood” offers different work modes in a way that echoes, perhaps, a classic college library — quiet focus zones, collaborative “thrive hubs,” and transient rooms for short bursts of work. Lighting and sound adjust to occupancy, and video systems auto-frame speakers to make hybrid meetings feel equal. Even the materials were chosen through a neurodiversity lens to balance stimulus and calm; bright blue patterned wallpaper here, calmer tones there. 

The idea, Miske said, isn’t to recreate home but to offer what home can’t.

“That’s why I say people want to be in person,” he said. “Because once you’re able to build that roadmap and so you can feel seen and heard and valued, you’re able to go back to wherever your working place is, whether you’re in a virtual environment or hybrid environment, and really execute on those.”

Across corporate America, companies are using architecture to reverse the isolation of remote work. But the stakes are high. Surveys show that 99% of RTO mandates lower engagement, and nearly half increase attrition. KPMG’s approach, a gentle pull rather than a push, is testing whether space itself can restore culture.

Walsh calls the tower “a representation of everything we are at KPMG.” 

He knows not everyone will be there every day, and that’s fine. 

“The most important place for our people,” he said, “is with our clients.”