Is AI coming for assistants?
Short answer: no, but it is coming for your role as you know it
There’s been a lot of talk about AI replacing admin-heavy white collar jobs — including executive assistants.
The cold, hard data: the US Bureau of Labor Statistics put ‘executive secretaries and executive administrative assistants’ as no. 13 on its list of fastest declining occupations in America. They predict 1 in 5 assistant roles will vanish between 2022-32 (source).
My view: the best assistants won’t disappear, they’ll evolve.
Many will stay in the role and use AI tools to their advantage, becoming hyper efficient. Some will retrain. Others will rise into a strategic chief of staff type role.
One thing’s for sure: even if AI doesn’t take your job, it will fundamentally change it.
What is gen AI, and why is it such a big deal?
Generative AI or gen AI is a subset of AI that’s all about creation. Gen AI models can autonomously create totally new content like art, music, text, video, voice, code. And they can do it using basic questions or instructions from us — no coding skills required.
Tech visionaries are saying gen AI will fundamentally change our world.
Bill Gates said seeing an early version of ChatGPT in 2022 was only the second time he’s witnessed tech that’s truly revolutionary (the first being a graphical user interface in 1980).
Ultimately this is the first time that we as knowledge workers are truly threatened by automation.
How will your work change?
Gen AI has the potential to take on many of our time-intensive manual tasks and complete them in 🪄 seconds.
Think about all of your repeatable admin – stuff like writing emails, minute-taking, sending around meeting actions, booking travel and tracking tasks that come in from all directions.
Now imagine if in a year a huge chunk of that was automated. Your day-to-day workflow will be totally transformed as you reclaim hours of your workday back.
That’s the promise of AI.
What happens next is up to you*.
Food for 💭 thought: AI promises more than just efficiency
AI can also expand our thinking.
It can be a thought partner — an unbiased party to bounce ideas off of, to offer a second opinion.
As Tsedal Neeley writes, it can help us spot patterns we didn’t notice or fill in for our blind spots. That wasn’t the case with past tech advancements at work (computers, mobile phones and so on) that just made us more efficient at what we were already doing.
[AI] has a more substantial influence on our work and our processes because it's able to find patterns that we can't see and then use them to provide insights and analysis, predictions, suggestions, and even full drafts all on its own.
Tsedal Neeley, Harvard Business School
The bottom line?
With AI you’ll become invaluable.
You’ll do your old role (but even better) and add value in other ways you might not even be able to imagine right now.
AI has the potential to significantly improve your workflow (anyone else 🙋♀️ thrilled by the prospect of never taking meeting minutes again?).
Try seeing it not as something that will take your role, but as something to augment your very human superpowers — your intuition, your empathy, your expertise.
AI + Human = 🦸 Superhuman
I’d love to hear your thoughts on all this. Hit reply if you have a sec.
Fiona
*Stay tuned, I’ll be back next week with 4 practical steps you can take to win in the age of AI.