Administrative assistants face grim employment outlook and incompetent workforce due to AI use

It remains to be seen how and to what extent AI will change her profession, but jobs for administrative assistants and secretaries have been in decline for decades. The unemployment rate for office workers and administrative assistants (a broader category that includes administrative assistants) rose to 4% compared with 3.6% last June, according to Labor Department data released Thursday, although that level remains lower than the overall unemployment rate. According to Current Population Survey data, approximately 3.5 million people worked in this role in 2004, nearly 97% of whom were women. Twenty years later, that number has fallen to 2.1 million, even though the overall workforce has increased during the same period.

And with the exception of medical secretaries and administrative assistants, a category projected to grow 4% by 2034 due to growth in the health care industry, economists at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predict the occupations will continue to decline.

“From a forecasting perspective over the past few cycles, the overall situation for clerical and managerial jobs is one of productivity technology, with limited job demand,” said Emily Lauren, chief economist in the BLS’s employment forecast division. Technological advances such as word processing, speech-to-text, and scheduling tools and apps have each transformed the job of administrative professionals and contributed to their overall decline.

A report released in January by the Brookings Institution found that administrative and managerial workers may be more exposed to AI-induced displacement than other professionals because they “lack the ability to adapt due to limited savings, older age, fewer local opportunities, and narrow skill sets.” Approximately 86% of these 6 million workers are women.

In fact, more secretaries and administrative assistants are age 55 and older than the overall workforce (34% vs. 23%), the median salary is lower than for all U.S. workers ($47,460 vs. $49,500), and a high school diploma is sufficient for many entry-level roles.

But as the Brookings report points out, what labor data doesn’t capture is the ability of individuals to navigate a changing environment, including administrative assistants like Danger, who it argues are “much more capable than people realize.”

Danger hosts biweekly virtual coffee chats for colleagues through the American Society of Administrative Professionals, a professional organization with approximately 132,000 members. Participants in the May session shared examples of how to use AI, including creating flyers, finding restaurants for executive events, devising captions for an employer’s social media accounts, and drafting standard operating procedure language.

However, despite the overall enthusiastic atmosphere, some participants raised concerns such as data security and lack of AI regulation. Some stress that AI cannot and will not replace the emotional intelligence and relationship-building skills that are hallmarks of successful managers.

Fiona Young, founder of Carve, a company focused on training executive assistants in AI, says she has seen a “huge shift in demand” for her services from 2023 onwards. Young, a former executive assistant herself, said she has provided AI training to management professionals around the world, including Google, Amazon, Uber, Salesforce, and LinkedIn. In her experience, employers want their employees to be able to take advantage of AI. “To be able to not just understand AI in broad strokes, but to truly leverage it as an integral part of how people work every day,” she says.

Oana Manolas takes an even stronger stance. “We will fire everyone who doesn’t use AI,” the founder and CEO of Sequel.io, a platform that allows companies to host webinars on their websites, wrote in a LinkedIn post last year.

But even Manolash says AI can’t replace executive assistant Stephanie Martinez.

Manolash said AI has allowed Martinez to “free up” from tasks such as note-taking and meeting preparation, allowing him to focus on the “human work” of building team connections, making decisions, understanding relationships with executives and stakeholders, and communicating accordingly.

While it’s likely that AI will replace “traditional” assistants, “AI will not replace the job of an executive assistant because the role is evolving,” Manolash says.

Mr. Martinez works remotely from El Salvador through Viva Talent. In another example of the changing landscape for its roles, Viva Talent trains assistants from Latin America and South America and matches them with technology companies primarily based in the United States.

“There are great opportunities for people who really want to succeed in this role,” Manolash says. “This person has access to information across the organization.”

For example, when the company aimed to drive more customer reviews on its software review platform, Martinez, who manages most of the invoices and charges, approached the problem innovatively. She leveraged AI to screen all customer communications, identify suitable candidates for reviews, and draft outreach emails. Without AI, “it would have taken her a very long time to do this,” Manolas said, adding that AI has allowed Martinez to “think creatively.”