The Assistant industry is splitting in two. Which side are you on?

You’ve heard the stories – AI is coming for your job. AI is touching every industry, but Assistants hear it in particular; our’s will be the first to go. Scheduling, inboxes, basic correspondence: AI can handle it, right?

Well, AI is here. It’s having a dramatic impact across the board, and yet Assistants remain. We haven’t been replaced yet. And we’re betting that Assistants will never be replaced, only redefined.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report did flag administrative roles as one of the categories expected to shrink fastest by 2030. But the definition covers only a small specific subset of tasks: routine admin, data entry, basic scheduling, template correspondence. Things that would always have been automated, with AI or not.

But that’s not really what being an Assistant is about. And the data around the wider scope of senior Assistants is telling a different story. Recent hiring figures show rising pay for experienced Assistants, with some employers offering premiums to attract the right level of talent.

Meanwhile, agencies like Upsource who work with CEOs and founders are seeing steadily increasing demand for high calibre Assistants. We’re using automations and AI daily in our client work, but we’re not automating ourselves out of a role. 

It’s not human vs AI, it’s Assistant v Assistant

The Assistant market itself is splitting, not shrinking. On one side: Assistants who’ve built AI into how they work: faster outputs, wider scope, handling things that used to require a whole ops hire and strategic problem solving. On the other: Assistants still working manually, doing the fundamentals work the old fashioned way.

Which means that the best Assistants and their services will continue to be in demand, AI is just the mechanism by which they are proving it.

AI hasn’t reduced the value of a good Assistant. It’s removed the basic layer and created more space for where the true value of  Assistants really lies. In their judgement, in their strategic thinking and in their creative problem solving.

AI is fantastic at the basics, but it’s a long way off human understanding of nuance, context and judgement. It can’t read the room in a stakeholder email. It can’t sense that your CEO is three coffees deep and running on empty, and adjust the day’s schedule accordingly. It can’t build the kind of trust where someone will actually push back on a decision, not just execute it. That’s a relationship. That’s a human being who knows you and knows your business.

What this means if you’re looking for an Assistant

ChatGPT became widely available in 2022, so if the last time you brought in an Assistant was 2021, you’re benchmarking against a role that no longer exists.

The practical questions worth asking an agency now are less “have you used AI?” and more, “what have you actually automated? What have you stopped doing manually because a tool now does it better? How has that changed what you can take on for a client?”

AI-awareness isn’t the same as an Assistant who’s genuinely rebuilt their (and their clients’) workflow around it.

The Upsource position

Human expertise, backed by scalable systems, supported by tech. Our Virtual Assistants use AI daily: pulling action points from a chaotic inbox, comparing supplier quotes in seconds, giving a first draft of a proposal a head start. We’re clearing the mechanical layer out of the way, so the human part of the job, what our clients actually hire us for, gets the focus it needs.

“I’m using AI daily, and it’s making me more efficient. But my clients haven’t reduced my hours, I’m busier than ever. Now I’m doing more strategic thinking and relationship management. The higher level support that fits my expertise and is why my client brought me on in the first place.” Helen, Upsource team member and Operations Whisperer

AI isn’t coming for Assistants jobs. It’s handling the fundamentals day to day, opening us up to do the work that really matters.

If your current admin support hasn’t evolved past 2021, it might be worth asking what it’s actually costing you in the strategic ground you’re not covering because nobody’s picked it up.

Get in touch if you want to talk to Caroline about what that could look like for you.