The new paradigm of executive assistants
It’s no secret that everyone would love an executive assistant.
Just walk out onto the side of the road, take a stroll in your office, or ping a colleague during a Zoom meeting and if you asked them the question, “If you could have an executive assistant, would you want one”, you would be hard pressed to find someone who would say no.
Yet the reality is, that most people don’t have executive assistants.
Beyond the simple fact that they're incredibly expensive, with the average salary for an EA in California being $57,287 per year. Even so. most people wouldn’t know how to get the most out of an Executive Assistant if one showed up at their doorstep tomorrow morning.
What most Executive Assistants do today IS NOT what the traditional paradigm of Executive Assistants has done in the recent past. Over the past 40-50 years the role of executive assistants has undergone a huge transformation, evolving from traditional admin work to a more strategic business partner for many executives. Yet simultaneously the number of working executive assistants is projected to drop from 2021 to 2031 over 20% with a subsequent 100,000 jobs lost in the United States alone.
In 2011 an article by Harvard Business Review titled, “The Case for Executive Assistants” by Melba J. Duncan, called into light an easy-to-miss but essential point of working with an executive assistant.
“Consider a senior executive whose total compensation package is $1 million annually, who works with an assistant who earns $80,000. For the organization to break even, the assistant must make the executive 8% more productive than he or she would be working solo…”
You might think to yourself, “Well I don’t make a million dollars a year, so that’s not exactly in my budget”. While the objective is true, the key takeaway here is that executive assistants are a productivity multiplier and need to only have a relatively subtle impact on the day-to-day workload of a traditional executive and leader to be a rational financial investment.
As we’ve moved into the new year and are a full year into the era of generative AI, the future of how executive assistants are leveraged, tasked, and organized is poised for a significant change.
Technologies Changing the Role of EAs
In the not-so-distant past, in an office not so far away, you would easily find an assistant tucked away by the corner office of a department manager or business owner. They would be sitting at a ready, diligently working at a typewriter with a growing stack of papers in the corner and a blocked calendar with events scribbled in professional yet rushed handwriting. Should you find yourself with the need to engage with the assistant's direct report, you would be faced with a challenge, how do you get through the assistant to the manager for whatever reason you had. With the assistant serving as the simultaneous calendar, organizer, communication blocker, and messaging for the report.
Yet today most of those tasks have been relegated away from the assistant and the burden placed back on the owner.
These are tools we all know and “love” like,
And with the proliferation of dozens and hundreds of other tools like these the model for “what is handled by the leader” and “what is handled by the assistant” has been flipped on its head with the burden of responsibility for handling these tasks solely on the shoulders of the entire global workforce.
Technologies Being Adopted by Business Leaders as Substitutes
There is no direct substitute for a human assistant working directly with you to solve both your personal and organizational challenges. Even with the new wave of AI tools like ChatGPT providing a conversational interface to general knowledge and capabilities, these technologies still have multiple cycles of evolution until they can be remotely comparable to what a fully empowered human assistant can do. Yet that hasn’t stopped leaders and managers from trying with 64% of business leaders saying they plan to adopt AI to improve productivity.
Technologies being adopted by business leaders in 2024:
Atlas Work Assistant is an AI-powered tool designed to handle a variety of administrative tasks through simple conversation, akin to a personal assistant. It manages schedules, priorities, emails, and document creation, and can recall information instantly. Integrated with everyday tools, Atlas enables users to command tasks through speech or text, automating tedious work. Its adoption in 2024 is due to its ability to streamline workflows, enhance productivity, and reduce the time spent on administrative tasks, providing significant value to business leaders and teams.
Microsoft Co-Pilot is an advanced AI tool integrated into the Microsoft 365 suite, aiming to revolutionize work methods and boost productivity within organizations. It provides a range of functionalities designed to streamline tasks, automate workflows, and enhance collaboration. Co-Pilot utilizes AI technologies to offer features like answering questions, creating content, and reasoning over data. It also has web grounding capabilities, ensuring access to the latest information, and is integrated with the Microsoft 365 apps.
However, Microsoft co-pilot requires Microsoft 365 access to be useful and requires the user to be in the Microsoft ecosystem.
Google Bard is an innovative AI tool developed by Google, powered by its advanced language model, LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). Bard is designed to combine the vast expanse of web information with the intelligence and creativity of large language models to provide high-quality, informative, and creative responses. It's particularly adept at simplifying complex topics and encouraging exploration and learning, making it a valuable tool for various uses, from education to creative brainstorming.
However, as of the date of this article, Google Bard had no explicit ability to manage a calendar, provide direct productivity assistants, or manage tasks.
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is an advanced AI language model designed to simulate human-like text generation. It leverages a variant of the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture, enabling it to produce coherent and contextually relevant text based on the input it receives. This technology is primarily used for a variety of applications including conversation simulation, content creation, information retrieval, and language translation.
And while it’s a few days away from launching the GPT store, OpenAI’s mission is to build general AI. Not a modern executive assistant.
The Future of Executive Assistants in 2024
While we do not currently possess a crystal ball capable of looking directly into the future and giving us absolute certainty. We do believe that the role of executive assistants in 2024 will be one where they are closely aligning at the strategic level of business operations and moving even farther away from the traditional day-to-day management that is now placed on the shoulders of the everyday person. We see the advancements of AI tools like Atlas and others to be driving the adoption of more technology-first executive assistants capable of bridging the gap between the tedious admin work and the necessary productivity improvements businesses are in search of.