AI is doing the secretary's job — the role is renaming itself, not disappearing
80% of what an assistant does is about to be handled by AI. What's left over is exactly why the company still needs a human.
I watched an executive assistant stare at her screen for a long moment after being introduced to the company's new AI assistant. Not because she didn't know how to use it. Because she'd just watched it schedule a meeting three times faster than she could.
The instinct is to panic about job loss. But what's actually happening, I think, isn't AI replacing the person — it's AI replacing the old definition of "assistant": the one who types the calendar, drafts template emails, compiles files. Honestly, that part was never the hard part of the job.
The remaining 20% is the actual job
A good assistant isn't good because they type fast. They're good because they know who's annoyed at whom in the room, know the boss wants bad news in the morning and not at the end of the day, and know that squeezing in one more meeting into an "open" slot is a political mistake even though the calendar says it's free. AI doesn't read that. Not yet, and maybe not for a long while.
Any company that lays off the assistant first and only afterward asks "okay, who handles the subtle stuff now" is deleting its own institutional memory. What's lost isn't typing speed — it's the one person who remembers exactly who clashed with whom three years ago, and knows how to seat them apart at the company-wide meeting.
AI doesn't need the boss to like it. Humans do — and that's exactly why humans are still necessary.
My personal bet: the assistant role doesn't vanish, it rebrands into something like "chief of staff", and pays better — because once AI clears out the easy 80%, what's left is precisely the hard part. And hard is worth more.