Generating AI is expediting daily access to the office, with posts such as administrative assistants and secretaries bearing the brunt. Proceedings, documentation, events and process drafting can already be done in minutes by ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot. But many practitioners and business managers believe that AI is more like a job reassignment rather than an immediate replacement for an entire category of jobs.
The number of posts has continued to decline.
This occupational group in the United States is in a shrinking path. According to current United States demographic data, approximately 3.5 million people worked as secretaries and administrative assistants in 2004, almost 97 per cent of whom were women; 20 years later, the figure had dropped to 2.1 million. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics also expects that, in addition to the Medical Secretary and the Medical Administrative Assistant, this career will continue to decline in the future.
The unemployment rate for office and administrative support posts in the broader sense has also increased. According to data released this week by the United States Department of Labor, unemployment in this category rose to 4 per cent, up from 3.6 per cent in the same period last year, but still below the overall level of unemployment.
AI replaces duplicate services
Deanna Danger, Executive Assistant to the Chief Information Officer at the University of Vanderburg, stated that she had been using AI in her work since 2022 and that minutes had now been handed over to Copilot and ChatGPT for processing. She said that the hours of work that had been required in the past would be done in less than five minutes, which would allow her to return to the session itself.
In an online exchange with the American Association of Administrative Professionals, participants referred to the use of AI as including the production of promotional material, screening of event restaurants, writing of social media texts and drafting of standard operating process texts. Most of these scenarios focus on the work of highly repetitive and well-formulated services.
High-level synergies still depend on manual
However, there is general agreement among business and training institutions that AI has difficulty in taking over more judgement- and relationship-based elements of the Administrative Assistant. Fiona Young, founder of Carve, who specializes in AI training for executive assistants, indicated that since 2023 there has been a marked increase in demand for related training. She states that the employer now wants the employee not to “know AI”, but to embed AI directly into the daily workflow.
Onea Manolache, founder and CEO of Sequel.io, wrote in LinkedIn last year that employees who do not use AI could be eliminated. At the same time, she states that AI is still unable to replace her own executive assistant Stephanie Martinez. In her view, the latter could instead devote more time to teamwork, external communication and the judgement of management and stakeholder relationships by using AI to handle the preparation and recording of meetings.
Watershed in training and management
It was mentioned that job changes did not depend solely on the capacity of the tool, but also on the training and empowerment of enterprises. The Executive Assistant Coach Melissa People indicated that many assistants were willing to adopt AI, but in reality there was often a lack of time and space to actually access the workflow.
She also noted that the industry had long been female-dominated and often twinned with male executives, and that different management styles directly affected the ability of assistants to participate in higher-value jobs. For practitioners who have access to AI at an early stage and are supported by management, jobs have not disappeared but are shifting to a higher level of synergy and implementation.