Administrative Assistants Turn to AI to Secure Jobs in Shrinking Field

Administrative assistants are confronting a dual challenge: decades of declining employment numbers and the rise of AI tools capable of handling core aspects of their work. Yet rather than accepting displacement, a segment of the profession is adopting these same technologies to redefine their value.

The numbers tell a stark story. Employment in secretarial and administrative assistant roles dropped from approximately 3.5 million in 2004 to 2.1 million in 2024, even as the overall workforce expanded. Nearly 97% of these workers were women two decades ago, and the profession remains heavily female-dominated today. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects continued contraction across most administrative categories through 2034, with medical administrative roles being a notable exception due to healthcare industry growth.

Why it matters

This trend illustrates a broader pattern in how AI may reshape white-collar work: not through wholesale replacement, but by forcing workers to evolve their roles or risk obsolescence. The outcome depends heavily on individual initiative, employer support, and access to training—factors that vary widely and often break along gender and power dynamics in the workplace.

Early adopters reshape the role

Deanna Danger, executive assistant to the chief information officer at Vanderbilt University, began using AI professionally in 2022. She now delegates meeting transcription to Copilot and ChatGPT, compressing hours of note-taking work into minutes. "All you do is have to evolve," said Danger, who has worked in administrative roles since 2003.

That sentiment is spreading. The American Society of Administrative Professionals, which serves approximately 132,000 members, hosts regular sessions where admins share AI applications: generating event flyers, researching restaurant options for executive gatherings, drafting social media captions, and creating standard operating procedures.

Fiona Young, founder of Carve, a training firm for executive assistants, reports "a massive shift in demand" for AI education since 2023. She has delivered training to administrative staff at Google, Amazon, Uber, Salesforce, and LinkedIn, according to reporting by the Associated Press.

The limits of automation

Oana Manolache, CEO of Sequel.io, wrote in a LinkedIn post that she would "fire anyone who doesn't use AI." Yet even she maintains that AI cannot replace her executive assistant, Stephanie Martinez, who works remotely from El Salvador.

Martinez uses AI to eliminate routine tasks, freeing capacity for relationship management, judgment calls, and cross-organizational coordination. When Sequel.io needed more customer reviews, Martinez used AI to analyze communications, identify candidates, and draft outreach—work that would have consumed far more time manually.

Structural barriers remain

A January report from the Brookings Institution identified clerical and administrative workers as particularly vulnerable to AI displacement due to "limited savings, advanced age, scarce local opportunities, and/or narrow skill sets." About 86% of these 6 million workers are women. Compared to the broader workforce, a higher proportion of administrative assistants are 55 or older (34% versus 23%), and median pay trails the national average ($47,460 versus $49,500).

Melissa Peoples, an executive assistant coach in Austin, Texas, notes that gender dynamics create uneven access to AI adoption. Some assistants work with executives who encourage experimentation and strategic thinking. Others face dismissive attitudes that limit their ability to evolve beyond traditional task execution.

Emily Rolen, lead economist for employment projections at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, explained that "productivity-enhancing technologies" have driven administrative job losses for multiple projection cycles. Word processing, speech-to-text, and scheduling applications each transformed the profession before AI arrived.

The current wave of AI tools represents another inflection point. The administrative professionals who survive it, according to those interviewed, will be those who use the technology to shift from execution to strategy—and who work in environments that permit that shift.

These details were first reported by the Associated Press.