Every employee can now have a kind of virtual secretary. The pitch reads as progress: a role once reserved for executives becomes available to anyone with a laptop.
I once had an assistant too. Employees of my own company had come to me saying that I was hard to reach and that email replies took too long. I decided to hire her, and I was glad I’d decided to do it. She sorted my appointments, booked travel, took phone calls and at some point started making decisions herself, because she understood me and my way of working very quickly. She had a family of her own and did this job gladly and well. The job was well paid and offered reliability. She was highly valued by everyone, myself included.
If every employee can have a virtual secretary, no one needs a human assistant. Vendors call this democratisation, because everyone supposedly benefits. What goes unsaid is that the people who did this job for a living lose it. Executive assistance is a profession heading towards extinction.
The pattern repeats across the technology industry. Everyone can now make their own music, cut their own film, write their own code, run their own virtual secretary. The people who used to do these things as a job are missing from that sentence. They dropped out of the conversation already, treated as no longer useful.
The work that came before had real value: an income, skills built over years, an identity tied to a task.
The same event helps whoever gets the virtual secretary and ends the job of the assistant it replaces.
I lived through the nineties when clerks were replaced by ERP systems. The line then was that staff were being freed up for higher-value work. Freed up meant let go. The higher-value work mostly did not exist, because it required qualifications the people being let go did not have. Presentations called it an efficiency gain.
The process today runs on the same logic. Vendors describe the technology for the people who buy it and leave out the people it affects. Companies decide before the description arrives, so whoever says efficiency gain does not have to justify anything further.
The sentence “every employee can now have a kind of virtual secretary” is addressed to the employees who cannot be replaced; the assistants it describes were struck from the plan before anyone read it.
Back to my own assistant. She did more than keep appointments in order; Outlook could already do that twenty years ago. The difference was, she knew what was important without me having to tell her, because she sensed it and had judgement. The software does not know that I enjoy chatting with a particular client and that after the birth of his son it’s appropriate to take a bit more time for it. It does not call him and ask, kindly, whether the appointment might move earlier for once.
AI promises this same judgement. What we actually mean by “secretary”, and whether that fits into software, is the question the promise leaves open.