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With their numbers already in decline, secretaries and administrative assistants face another\u00a0growing threat: artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Claude that can accomplish aspects of their workload with a tap.<\/p>\n
Employment projection data offers a grim outlook for the women-dominated profession that may be particularly vulnerable to AI-induced job displacement compared to the broader workforce. But some admins are embracing the technology \u2014 and even using it as a tool to get ahead.<\/p>\n
Deanna Danger, 43, has worked in an administrative role since 2003. She says adapting and staying ahead of the curve is a key part of her constantly-changing role, and AI is no exception.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll you do is have to evolve,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Danger started using AI professionally in 2022, learning through experimentation and collaboration with fellow admins. Today, she no longer takes notes during meetings \u2014 she\u2019s set up Copilot and ChatGPT to do it for her. That has freed her to \u201cactually participate in the meetings, and not just worry about making sure I typed everything out that was said,\u201d says Danger, executive assistant to the chief information officer at Vanderbilt University. \u201cHonestly, what used to take me hours I\u2019m now done with in under five minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n
How \u2014 and to what extent \u2014 AI might\u00a0reshape her profession\u00a0remains to be seen, but jobs for administrative assistants and secretaries have been dwindling for decades. In 2004, about 3.5 million people worked in the role \u2014 nearly 97% of them women, according to\u00a0Current Population Surveydata. Twenty years later, that number slid to 2.1 million \u2014 despite overall workforce growth during the same period. And except for medical secretaries and administrative assistants \u2014 a category projected to grow 4% by 2034 thanks to growth of the healthcare industry \u2014\u00a0economists at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics\u00a0predict a\u00a0continued decline\u00a0in the profession.<\/p>\n
The unemployment rate for\u00a0office and administrative support workers\u00a0\u2014 a broader category that also includes accounting clerks, postal service workers and more \u2014 ticked up to 4% compared to 3.6% in June last year, according to Labor Department data\u00a0released Thursday, although that level remains lower than the overall unemployment rate.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe overall story in office and admin occupations from the projection standpoint for the last several cycles has been one of productivity-enhancing technologies, limiting demand for employment,\u201d said Emily Rolen, lead economist for the division of employment projections at the BLS. Technological advances \u2014 word processing, speech-to-text transcription, scheduling tools and apps \u2014 each transformed the duties of administrative professionals and contributed to overall decline.<\/p>\n
Clerical and administrative workers may be more exposed to AI-induced job displacement than other professionals because they \u201clack adaptive capacity due to limited savings, advanced age, scarce local opportunities, and\/or narrow skill sets,\u201d according to a\u00a0Brookings Institution reportpublished in January. About 86% of these 6 million workers are women.<\/p>\n
Indeed, more secretaries and administrative assistants are\u00a055 and oldercompared to the workforce at large (34% vs. 23%),\u00a0median pay\u00a0is lower than that of all U.S. workers ($47,460 vs. $49,500), and a high school diploma is sufficient for many entry-level roles.<\/p>\n
But what labor data doesn\u2019t capture \u2014 as noted by the Brookings report \u2014 is an individual\u2019s ability to navigate a changing environment, including administrative assistants like Danger, who say they \u201care way more capable than people think.\u201d<\/p>\n
Danger hosts a biweekly virtual coffee chat for peers through the American Society of Administrative Professionals, a professional group that says it serves about 132,000 members. Participants in a May session shared their AI use cases: creating flyers, scouting out restaurants for executive events, coming up with captions for employer social media accounts, drafting standard operating procedure language, and more.<\/p>\n
But despite the overall atmosphere of enthusiasm, some participants raised concerns, including\u00a0data security\u00a0and the lack of\u00a0AI regulation. Others emphasized that AI cannot, and will not, replace the emotional intelligence and relationship building skills that are hallmarks of a successful admin.<\/p>\n
Fiona Young, founder of Carve, a business focused on training executive assistants on AI, says she has seen \u201ca massive shift in demand\u201d for her services since 2023. Young, a former executive assistant herself, says she has delivered AI training to administrative professionals globally, including at Google, Amazon, Uber, Salesforce and LinkedIn. In her experience, employers want staff to be able to leverage AI \u2014 \u201cnot just loosely understanding it, but genuinely using it as an integral part of how people are working every day,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Oana Manolache takes an even stronger stance. The founder and CEO of Sequel.io, a platform that enables companies to host webinars on their own websites, wrote in a\u00a0LinkedIn post\u00a0last year: \u201cI will fire anyone who doesn\u2019t use AI.\u201d<\/p>\n
But even Manolache says AI could not replace her executive assistant, Stephanie Martinez.<\/p>\n
Manolache says Martinez uses AI to \u201cfree herself\u201d from tasks like note-taking and meeting prep to focus on the \u201chuman work\u201d of building team connectivity, making judgment calls, understanding executives\u2019 relationships with stakeholders and communicating accordingly.<\/p>\n
Maybe AI could supplant the \u201ctraditional\u201d assistant, but \u201cit doesn\u2019t replace what an executive assistant does now as the role has evolved,\u201d Manolache says.<\/p>\n
Martinez works remotely from El Salvador through Viva Talent, which \u2014 in another example of the shifting landscape for the role \u2014 trains and matches assistants from Latin and South America to primarily U.S.-based tech companies.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe people who truly want to succeed in this role have a massive opportunity,\u201d Manolache says. \u201cThis person has access to information across the entire organization.\u201d<\/p>\n
For instance, when the company aimed to drive more customer reviews on a software review platform, Martinez, who manages most invoices and billing, approached the problem innovatively. She leveraged AI to sift through all customer communications, pinpoint good candidates for reviews, and draft outreach emails. Without AI, \u201cit would have taken her so long to do this,\u201d Manolache says, adding that it also freed up Martinez to \u201cthink creatively.\u201d<\/p>\n
That freedom to strategically implement AI is just as important as education and training, since many assistants are interested in adopting AI but lack the bandwidth to incorporate it, says Melissa Peoples, an Austin, Texas-based executive assistant coach and former C-suite executive assistant.<\/p>\n
Gender dynamics compound that challenge in an industry dominated by women who are often paired with male leaders, Peoples says.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou see those that are early adopters, and are crushing it, and are partnered with really empowering executives, and can do all of these things,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd then you see the other side of this, where literally assistants are being told, \u2018You\u2019re not smart enough to be in the room. Just bring me my coffee.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
With effective AI training, Peoples says admins can \u201cfind their voice\u201d and \u201chave higher impact so they are protected against what is going to happen as agentic AI becomes more commonplace and more easily accessible.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
#CEO #vowed #fire #doesnt #admits #replace #executive #assistant<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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