Will AI Replace the Assistant?

When an article gives me the ick, you know it has to be bad. The full-body repulsion I felt when reading an article shared by Hilani Ellis of Exceptional Admins recently on LinkedIn was a pretty unique experience. You can read the full article here if you're inclined, but I'll give you a quick summary.

They state, "Executive assistants are primarily time-savers. The good ones, according to Pahlavan, end up becoming your friends. But those good assistants are neither cheap nor readily available to the bulk of workers."

Leveling with you right now, Pahlavan, we're not your friend. Most of us don't even like the people we support as a person, but we enjoy paychecks. They list off an example of the program making a dinner reservation for him as how this will be a game-changing program for people who can't afford an assistant. What he seems to forget, as most men in leadership positions do, is there is a broad range of invisible labor that goes into something even as small as making a dinner reservation. The value of an administrative professional isn't that we'll actually pick up the phone to call the restaurant. The value in a skilled Executive Assistant is:

-Knowing what neighborhood you're staying in and if you'll need to drive and be able to park
-Knowing that you don't eat seafood and prefer to not go to a loud restaurant
-Remembering that the last time you went to XYZ, there was a hair in your food so maybe let's not go there again
-Someone you're inviting to the dinner is vegan, so you need a few choices for them on the menu as well

Here's the thing, there are over 304,678 executive assistants currently employed in the United States. 86.9% of all executive assistants are women, while 13.1% are men. That doesn't encapsulate periphery things like Virtual Assistants and Administrative Assistants, or a dozen other miscategorized titles. They wouldn't be discussing the industry like this if it was male-dominated. You would never read the words, "The good ones, end up becoming your friends." about a software engineer. The reason our work is overlooked and written off is the same battle women have been fighting since the beginning of time, because the work we do isn't as visible, it's not considered as important. We live in a world that is dominated by men, their opinions, and their idea of what is valuable. 

The average CEO salary in the United States is $823,245.
The average Executive Assistant salary in the United States is $67,415.

If what we do is so basic, that AI is going to replace it, and be a massive cost savings, I'd challenge that replacing a CEO with AI is the better way to go. Your role as a CEO is to create the vision, drive it forward, and make judgment calls. Sounds like something ChatGPT can do, and with significantly less risk.

AI is here, and we can't avoid the way that organizations are going to use it to cut costs. We can only do what we can to learn, grow and advance our careers in a way that takes back the power. We have the EQ that these people do not, and that powered by AI is something that is truly unmatched.