Will AI replace the Executive Assistant role?

If you’re an EA or PA, you’ve probably been asked this question at a dinner table in the last year, and you may well have asked it of yourself late at night when a new tool was announced. I’m asked it most weeks by assistants and by the executives who employ them, so I thought it was time to write down where I’ve landed, which is that AI will not replace the Executive Assistant role, although it is changing the role quickly enough that nobody in the profession can afford to ignore it.

I have been recruiting executive assistants for over a decade, and I’ve never had more conversations about the role than I’m having now. Some of those conversations are with worried assistants, but more of them are with executives who have tried to run their diary through an AI tool, lasted about a fortnight, and come back to me asking for a person.

What happened this week

Anthropic, the company that builds the Claude AI models, shared senior Executive Assistant roles this week, and the press picked up a London assistant role at a reported salary of £145,000.

A company whose entire purpose is building AI that can read an inbox, draft a reply and plan a week has decided that its senior leaders need experienced human assistants, and nobody there is confused about what AI can and can’t do, because they understand its limits better than anyone and they’re hiring for exactly that gap. It isn’t an isolated case either, because in my experience the briefs I’ve been working on this year ask for more from the EA rather than less, and the executives behind them want someone who can hold the whole picture, make decisions in their absence, and run the office of the leader rather than the admin of the leader.

What AI genuinely does well

I’m not going to pretend the tools are useless, because they aren’t, and an EA who pretends otherwise will be overtaken by one who has learned to use them well.

AI is good at first drafts, at summarising a long thread, at pulling the actions out of a meeting transcript, at turning rough notes into a tidy briefing, and at finding a slot that works across three calendars, which is to say it’s good at the repetitive work that used to eat the first two hours of an assistant’s day. If your role is mostly that kind of work, then the honest position is that the role is changing underneath you and the change has already started, which is a reason to learn the tools properly rather than a reason to panic.

What AI can’t do, and why that’s the job

When I sit with executives and ask what their best assistant actually does for them, the answers have very little to do with admin.

The first thing they talk about is judgement, because an AI can find a free slot but it can’t know that the CFO has had a bruising week, that the two people you’re about to put in a room don’t get on, or that your executive shouldn’t be scheduled for anything demanding in the hour before a board meeting, whereas the EA knows all of that because the EA has been paying attention for months.

The second is relationships, since so much of the role runs on trust built with other assistants, with the chair’s office, and with the person at the venue who’ll find you a room when there isn’t one, and AI has no network of its own and can’t pick up the phone to call in a favour.

The third is the context nobody wrote down, because executives make decisions in corridors, on calls, and in the thirty seconds after a meeting ends, and the assistant who was there holds information that never made it into an email, which no tool can summarise because it was never captured.

The fourth is authority, because a senior EA decides what reaches the executive and what doesn’t, what gets booked and what gets declined, and often what gets spent up to an agreed limit, and that authority has been earned over time in a way that can’t be handed to a prompt.

The last is discretion, because an EA sees pay, restructures, exits and personal matters and handles all of it quietly, and trust of that kind sits with a person rather than with a piece of software.

None of this is new, but what is new is that the admin layer around it is thinning out, which means the judgement and the relationships are now a much larger share of the role than they were even three years ago.

What an EA looks like in 2026

Emily and I built eavolve around the belief that the assistant role has grown into something more strategic than its job description, and that most EAs and PAs have never been given the training to match the job they’re actually doing.

The EA I’m placing in 2026 uses AI tools every day without thinking about it, in the same way they use Outlook, and they’ve handed the first draft, the summary and the diary logic to those tools so that they can spend the time it frees up closer to the executive. They understand the business well enough to prepare their leader for a meeting rather than simply get them to it, they’re in the room when decisions are made, they’re trusted to make decisions of their own, and they’re measured on outcomes rather than on how many emails they cleared. That’s a better job than the one it replaces, and it’s also a job that commands a higher salary, which is a conversation for another article.

How to use AI to become more strategic, not less relevant

The assistants who worry me aren’t the ones who’ve embraced AI or the ones who’ve ignored it, but the ones who’ve learned to use it for the wrong thing, which is doing the same admin slightly faster and then filling the time they’ve saved with more admin. The question to ask isn’t what AI can take off your plate but what you should be doing with the hours it gives back, and if your answer is sitting in on the leadership meeting, building the relationships that make your executive more effective, or taking ownership of a project nobody else has time for, then you’ve understood where the role is going.

That’s what our Future Ready EA & PA Training Day is for. It’s a one-day course that I deliver alongside Emily Partridge and Alice Garside, eavolve’s associate trainer, and it’s built around how an EA or PA uses AI to become more strategic rather than more efficient at the wrong things. Emily brings fifteen years as a senior EA in FTSE 100 CEO offices and the experience of managing a global team of sixty EAs, and between the three of us the day covers the tools, the thinking, and the plan for the weeks that follow. If you’d like to talk it through before you book, you can book a discovery call with us.

If you want to go deeper on what to learn and in what order, I wrote about what AI training for EAs and PAs should actually cover earlier this year, and about the skills a modern EA needs in 2027, and both sit within our wider EA and PA training programmes.

So, will AI replace the EA role?

AI will not replace the Executive Assistant role, but it will replace the version of the role that was mostly admin, and it’s doing that already. The role that’s left, built on judgement, relationships, context and trust, is more valuable than it has ever been, and the companies building the AI are hiring for it, so the EAs and PAs who’ll do best over the next few years are the ones who get ahead of this now rather than the ones who wait to see what happens.

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