The virtual secretary

Every employee can now have a kind of virtual secretary. That’s what you hear everywhere and it sounds like progress for everyone. So everyone can now get what was previously reserved for the few.

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 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 not only by me but by everyone.

If every employee now has a virtual secretary, then no one needs an assistant anymore. In the modern working world this gets phrased differently: tasks that used to be reserved for assistants are being democratised. Because: everyone benefits. What isn’t said: real assistants lose their jobs. What isn’t said at all: assistance is a profession that is disappearing.

“Everyone can now have their own assistant” is the tech industry’s favourite line. Everyone can now produce music or films. Everyone can now program. Everyone can now have a virtual secretary. What’s missing from the debate are the people who used to do these things as a profession. They have already vanished from the conversations. They are already the past, and in the tech narrative the past is always what’s outdated and past its usefulness.

But the before wasn’t bad. They were jobs with income and skills that someone had built up over years. They were identities tied to an activity and are not being democratised but eliminated. Democratisation and elimination here are different words for the same process, depending on which side you’re on.

If you’re the employee now getting their virtual secretary, you celebrate. If you’re the secretary being replaced, you don’t.

I lived through the nineties when clerks were replaced by ERP systems. The line back then was: the employees are being freed up for higher-value tasks. The word freed up meant: laid off. The higher-value tasks mostly weren’t even there, because they required qualifications that those being let go didn’t have. In the presentations this was called efficiency gain.

The process is the same now as it was then. The technology is described for those who buy it, not for those it affects. The decisions have already been made anyway, because efficiency gain justifies everything without question.

That every employee can now have a kind of virtual secretary is a promise and a threat at the same time. The promise is directed at the irreplaceable, the threat applies to those who have long been crossed off in the planning.

My assistant didn’t just bring order to my appointments, because Outlook could 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. AI promises this too. But now I ask myself what we actually mean when we say secretary, and whether what we mean can be mapped into software. Because the software doesn’t call a client and ask him in friendly words whether we shouldn’t move the appointment a little earlier, because it doesn’t know that I enjoy chatting with this client and that after the birth of his son it’s appropriate to take a bit more time for it.