The virtual secretary

Every employee can now have a kind of virtual secretary. That’s what they say everywhere and it sounds like progress. So everyone can get what was previously reserved for the few.

I once had an assistant too. Employees of my own company had approached me about being hard to reach and email replies taking too long. I was glad I made that decision. She sorted my appointments, booked travel, took phone calls and at some point started making decisions herself because she understood me and the way I work very quickly.

She had a family of her own and did this job well and gladly. The job was well paid and offered reliability. She was valued not just by me but by everyone.

If every employee now has a virtual secretary, nobody needs an assistant anymore. In the modern working world this gets phrased differently though: tasks that used to be reserved for assistants are being democratized. Because: everyone benefits. What doesn’t get said: real assistants lose their jobs. What doesn’t get said at all: being an assistant is a profession that’s disappearing.

“Everyone can now have their own assistant” is the tech industry’s favorite sentence. Everyone can now produce music or films. Everyone can now code. Everyone can now have a virtual secretary. What’s missing from the debate are the people who used to do these things for a living. They’ve already disappeared from the conversations. They’re already the past and in the technology narrative the past is always the outdated and obsolete.

But the before wasn’t bad. These were jobs with income and skills that someone built over years. These were identities tied to a profession that aren’t being democratized but eliminated. Democratization and elimination are different words for the same process, depending on which side you’re standing on.

If you’re the employee who now gets a virtual secretary, you celebrate. If you’re the secretary being replaced, you don’t.

In the nineties I watched clerks get replaced by ERP systems. The phrase at the time was: employees will be freed up for higher-value tasks. The word freed up means here: laid off. The higher-value tasks mostly didn’t exist because they required qualifications the freed-up people didn’t have. In the presentations this was called efficiency gains.

The process is always the same, then as now. The technology gets described for those who buy it, not for those it affects. The decisions have already been made anyway because efficiency gains justify everything without question.

That every employee can now have a kind of virtual secretary is a promise and a threat at the same time. The promise is aimed at the irreplaceable, the threat applies to those who were already crossed off in the planning long ago.

My assistant didn’t just bring order to my schedule because Outlook could do that twenty years ago. The difference was she knew what mattered without me telling her. Because she sensed it and had judgment. AI promises that too. But now I find myself asking what we actually mean when we say secretary. And whether what we mean can be captured in software. But the software doesn’t call a client and ask him in friendly words whether we should move the appointment up a bit. Because she knows that I like to chat with this client and that after the birth of his son it’s appropriate to take a little more time.