The virtual secretary

Every employee can now have a kind of virtual secretary. That’s what they say everywhere. The sentence sounds like democratization. Like progress. Everyone gets what only a few had before.

I once had an assistant. Not because I was important, but because the company had it set up that way from a certain level. Her name was Claudia. She sorted my appointments, booked my travel, filtered my calls. She knew when I didn’t want to be disturbed. She knew who to put through. She made decisions I never noticed because they were right.

Claudia had a family. She did this job because it paid well and offered stability. She was good at it. And she was a person who worked at a company where her work was valued.

If every employee now has a virtual secretary, nobody needs Claudia anymore.

The industry puts it differently. It says: Tasks that used to be reserved for assistants are being democratized. It says: Everyone benefits. It doesn’t say: Claudia loses her job. It also doesn’t say: Being an assistant is a profession that’s disappearing. It says: Everyone can now.

“Everyone can now” is the tech industry’s favorite sentence. Everyone can now produce music. Everyone can now edit films. Everyone can now code. Everyone can now have a virtual secretary. What’s missing from these sentences are the people who used to do these things for a living. They don’t appear. They are the before. And in the technology narrative, the before is always the inferior state.

But the before wasn’t bad. The before was jobs. Income. Skills that someone built over years. Professional pride. An identity tied to what you did. None of that gets democratized. It gets 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. Freed up. The words sound like liberation. They mean: laid off. The higher-value tasks mostly didn’t exist. Or they required qualifications the freed-up people didn’t have. But that wasn’t in the project presentations. Those said: Efficiency gains.

The pattern is always the same. The technology gets described from the top, for those who buy it. Not from the bottom, for those it affects. It speaks to decision-makers. It talks about employees. Not with them.

Every employee can now have a kind of virtual secretary. That sentence contains a promise and a threat, and both are delivered with the same smile. The promise is for those who read the sentence. The threat is for those who don’t appear in it.

Claudia was a good assistant. Not because she could sort appointments. A calendar can do that. But because she knew what mattered before I told her. Because she sensed when something was off. Because she had judgment.

The question isn’t whether AI can sort appointments. Outlook could do that twenty years ago. The question is what we actually mean when we say secretary. And whether what we mean can be captured in software. Or whether we only believe it can because we never looked closely enough.