A grim job outlook meets a scrappy workforce as administrative assistants harness AI

With their numbers already in decline, secretaries and administrative assistants face another growing threat: artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT and Claude that can accomplish aspects of their workload with a tap.

Employment projection data offers a grim outlook for the women-dominated profession that may be particularly vulnerable to AI-induced job displacement compared to the broader workforce. But some admins are embracing the technology — and even using it as a tool to get ahead.

Deanna Danger, 43, has worked in an administrative role since 2003. She says adapting and staying ahead of the curve is a key part of her constantly changing role, and AI is no exception.

“All you do is have to evolve,” she says.

Danger started using AI professionally in 2022, learning through experimentation and collaboration with fellow admins. Today, she no longer takes notes during meetings — she’s set up Copilot and ChatGPT to do it for her. That has freed her to “actually participate in the meetings, and not just worry about making sure I typed everything out that was said”, says Danger, executive assistant to the chief information officer at Vanderbilt University. “Honestly, what used to take me hours I’m now done with in under five minutes.”

How — and to what extent — AI might reshape her profession remains to be seen, but jobs for administrative assistants and secretaries have been dwindling for decades. In 2004, about 3.5 million people worked in the role — nearly 97 per cent of them women, according to Current Population Survey data. Twenty years later, that number slid to 2.1 million — despite overall workforce growth during the same period. And except for medical secretaries and administrative assistants — a category projected to grow 4.0 per cent by 2034, thanks to growth of the healthcare industry — economists at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predict a continued decline in the profession.

The unemployment rate for office and administrative support workers — a broader category that also includes accounting clerks, postal service workers, and more — ticked up to 4.0 per cent, compared to 3.6 per cent in June last year, according to Labor Department data released on Thursday, although that level remains lower than the overall unemployment rate.

“The overall story in office and admin occupations from the projection standpoint for the last several cycles has been one of productivity-enhancing technologies, limiting demand for employment,” said Emily Rolen, lead economist for the division of employment projections at the BLS. Technological advances — word processing, speech-to-text transcription, scheduling tools and apps — each transformed the duties of administrative professionals and contributed to overall decline.

Clerical and administrative workers may be more exposed to AI-induced job displacement than other professionals because they “lack adaptive capacity due to limited savings, advanced age, scarce local opportunities, and/or narrow skill sets”, according to a Brookings Institution report published in January. About 86 per cent of these six million workers are women.

Indeed, more secretaries and administrative assistants are 55 and older compared to the workforce at large (34 per cent vs 23 per cent), median pay is lower than that of all US workers (US$47,460 vs. US$49,500), and a high school diploma is sufficient for many entry-level roles.

But what labour data doesn’t capture — as noted by the Brookings report — is an individual’s ability to navigate a changing environment, including administrative assistants like Danger, who say they “are way more capable than people think”.

Danger hosts a bi-weekly virtual coffee chat for peers through the American Society of Administrative Professionals, a professional group that says it serves about 132,000 members. Participants in a May session shared their AI use cases: creating flyers, scouting out restaurants for executive events, coming up with captions for employer social media accounts, drafting standard operating procedure language, and more.

But despite the overall atmosphere of enthusiasm, some participants raised concerns, including data security and the lack of AI regulation. Others emphasised that AI cannot, and will not, replace the emotional intelligence and relationship-building skills that are hallmarks of a successful admin.

Fiona Young, founder of Carve, a business focused on training executive assistants on AI, says she has seen “a massive shift in demand” for her services since 2023. Young, a former executive assistant herself, says she has delivered AI training to administrative professionals globally, including at Google, Amazon, Uber, Salesforce and LinkedIn. In her experience, employers want staff to be able to leverage AI — “not just loosely understanding it, but genuinely using it as an integral part of how people are working every day”, she says.

Oana Manolache takes an even stronger stance. The founder and CEO of Sequel.io, a platform that enables companies to host webinars on their own websites, wrote in a LinkedIn post last year: “I will fire anyone who doesn’t use AI.”

But even Manolache says AI could not replace her executive assistant, Stephanie Martinez.

Manolache says Martinez uses AI to “free herself” from tasks like note-taking and meeting prep to focus on the “human work” of building team connectivity, making judgement calls, understanding executives’ relationships with stakeholders and communicating accordingly.

Maybe AI could supplant the “traditional” assistant, but “it doesn’t replace what an executive assistant does now as the role has evolved”, Manolache says.

Martinez works remotely from El Salvador through Viva Talent, which — in another example of the shifting landscape for the role — trains and matches assistants from Latin and South America to primarily US-based tech companies.