How to Leverage AI as an EA

Wondering how to best use AI as an EA? Hear from guest Fiona Young on the upsides of leveraging AI, including as a shortcut for career advancement.

Recorded at EA Ignite Fall 2024 and produced by the American Society of Administrative Professionals - ASAP. Learn more and submit a listener question at asaporg.com/podcast.

Leah Warwick: Hi, everyone. I'm Leah Warwick, and you're listening to "The Admin Edge." AI is still a hot-button topic for administrative professionals, so who better to discuss this with than former EA and AI expert, Fiona Young? Fiona is the Founder of Carve, and was a trainer at our American Society of Administrative Professionals event, EA Ignite Fall in Miami. I hope you enjoy this conversation between me and Fiona at EA Ignite.

Hi, I'm Leah Warwick, Editor for ASAP, and my guest today is Fiona Young, Founder of Carve and a trainer at this event, EA Ignite. Welcome to the podcast, Fiona.

00:00:47                     

Fiona Young: Thank you, Leah. Thanks for having me.

Leah Warwick: It's so good to have you here and so good to meet you in person. It's been so fun, so far. Would you tell our listeners a bit about yourself, your background? How did you go from EA to AI expert?

Fiona Young: Yeah, so I started my career as an EA, and pretty soon after I joined as an EA to a venture capital founder, I started picking up some L&D work, learning and development work off the side of my desk. That's kind of how it started. After working with him for a few years, I ended up carving out my own role as head of learning for that group. That kicked off really a decade spent in learning and development roles.

A couple of years ago, I decided it was time for me to build my own learning products and programs, and I really wanted to focus on EAs. My original idea was I wanted to go out and help EAs to carve out their progression path, to build the leadership skills that I had spent a decade of my career essentially training leaders on, in order to create that progression for themselves. 

00:01:50

Around the same time, of course, ChatGPT was launched into the world and I saw the potential for it. The more I used it, the more I realized, this is the answer, actually, to solve the question of career progression for EAs, because suddenly we have this incredibly powerful tool and set of tools in AI that can shortcut the admin drudgery and give you time back to be able to do more of the strategic work, more of the project work, more of the work that, frankly, gets you noticed, that gets you promoted. So that's how I kind of pivoted into, 18 months ago, building AI courses and consultancy, corporate training for EAs specifically. 

Leah Warwick: It is very important for EAs (and all admin professionals, really) to use AI to their advantage. What are some of the ways in which executive admins can best leverage AI for high-impact results?

00:02:44                     

Fiona Young: Well, I think, before I get into practical tips and tactics, I just want to say I think there's really two sides to this coin, actually, as we think about executive assistants – so operating at a senior, more strategic level. I think the first thing to think about is: What is the admin drudgery, where humans are not adding a huge amount of value, that I can outsource to AI?

The second side of the coin is actually: How can I use AI as a career coach, as a thought partner, to help me map out my career progression and my next steps? 

So I think both of those are really useful and valuable ways to be using AI. So thinking about that first bucket of admin drudgery, it's the dull admin that no one likes to do anyway. It's stuff like processing expenses and writing meeting minutes, or even just meeting summaries. It's reading a hundred-page thought leadership article and just report – giving a really tailored, contextualized summary to your executive. It's researching, whether that's for meeting briefings, researching for travel, researching for procurement purposes. 

00:03:55

It's so much more than that as well. It's just the everyday, little asks that come on your desk that maybe before you would've jumped to Google to answer – concierge requests, for instance, of: Oh, I need a restaurant in Manhattan that is suitable for vegans and open on Mondays and also takes reservations. You could spent literally hours on Google, trolling through hundreds of restaurants, to try to find that perfect needle in the haystack, but now AI can help you just create shortlists for stuff like that so much faster. 

And I think on the flip side of the coin, on helping you be more strategic, I think one of the best use cases is really creating your development plan with AI. What I mean by that is really feeding it your job description, feeding it the parts of your job that you love, the parts that you don't love, getting it to help you to brainstorm, "Okay, what are potential career paths for me?" which I know is really a pain point for a lot of EAs that I speak to. It's like, "I'm not sure chief of staff is quite right for me. What other paths are out there, besides the sort of chief of staff or project manager type route?" 

00:05:05

So I think, obviously, using it as a brainstorming tool is super powerful, because AI is unbiased. What I mean by that is it isn't like your family, your friends, your partner, who have all of this background information on you, who has expectations about who you are and maybe where you should go with your career, and so will be able to really talk to you and ask you the right questions to draw out ideas that you have probably never thought of before. And then I think to help you create that tailored, targeted plan of: Okay, if I'm here and I have, through our brainstorming conversations and essentially career coaching, decided I want to get there, well, how might I do that? What does that path look like? And what are the really practical and tactical things I can do in the coming 3, 6, 9, 12 months – and even over years – to be able to get there? What are the skills I need to develop? And give me some smart goals and specific things that I can do to get there.

00:06:03                     

Leah Warwick: Yes, I love that, using AI as a tool for your own career progression, and also really thinking about, if you're in the weeds all the time, in any role, you cannot be strategic and you cannot see the bigger picture. So all those little tasks that you mentioned that nobody really likes to do anyway, outsource that to AI. And then also use AI as your friend who's unbiased (like you were talking about) to explore those next steps. And you'll have more time to dive into the business. What does the business need? How can I add value to the business in my role? Is there an opportunity to create a career progression here that might not exist, and how do I map that out? Is it having a department of admins? Can I be VP of Executive Administration? These things are not out of the question, but you have to have the time to start building that out for yourself and making that plan.

00:06:54

I did see some articles this year that I saw you posted about on LinkedIn, too, from The Wall Street Journal and then one from The New York Times, saying, basically, that human admins and assistants will become useless, essentially, because executives and companies will start using AI assistants instead. That seems to be the general perception. If people at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are writing in this way, there clearly is a lack of understanding of what admins and EAs really do and the value that they add.

So when you see things like this, what do you think? And how do you talk to, one, the admins themselves, many of whom are fearful of AI, and articles like this don't help? And number two, the organizations who don't seem to fully understand what their admins and EAs do in the first place. 

00:07:42                     

Fiona Young: Yeah, it's such a great question. The article that I wrote a post about from The New York Times, to give context for those who haven't read it, called assistants "flunkies" who do "meaningless work," which is ridiculous when you dig into the article, though, because the examples they give are of people who are doing purely transactional assistant jobs that maybe you would expect someone to be doing, say, in the 1980s, but really not today, and really not the sort of folks that we're working with here today at EA Ignite.

I think there's a real deep lack of understanding of what the role actually is. So for EAs who are thinking, "Gosh, what does all this mean for me?" I would say, first off, when I talk to folks and I hear the fear coming out, typically that comes from a place of a lack of understanding of what AI is and what its current capabilities and limitations are. 

And so I would really encourage people to really lean into [it]. Wrap your arms around it and see for yourself. The AI assistants out there, the Siris and similar, and ChatGPT and other LLMs, are absolutely not capable of the sort of nuanced communication, prioritization, the soft skills that we have as human executive assistants, and I don't think that human executive assistants are going away. 

00:09:05

But on the flip side, you do need to learn these tools in order to stay relevant, right? There was a study that came out, Microsoft and LinkedIn, on the future of AI at work study that came out in May of this year, where they cited that 71% of leaders who are hiring would prefer to hire a less-experienced candidate who knows AI than a more experienced one. So these skills are already in high demand and will soon be really expected of everyone. But, for now, they're a differentiator.

So really wrapping your arms around: How can this help me? What are the ways in which I can use this day to day to go faster, to go further, and to be able to create a bigger role for myself? I think that's the key thing, to be able to say, "Okay, a year from now, this is the shape of my role today. Look at all these things I do today that I didn't do a year ago. I deserve that pay raise. I deserve that promotion because I am that much more valuable to you, to the organization at large. 

00:10:06

And for executives – and I think actually you weren't talking specifically about executives but about whole organizations. I think that we, as EAs, need to really be more visible in what we do and in our role. I wrote about this recently, actually. I wrote about this idea of really using AI as a tool to help you to create your personal brand statement. What is this for? This is for your LinkedIn overview. This is for events, networking events, when you're meeting people for the first time, for when you're meeting people in your office as well who you've never met before, executives and so forth, to help them understand what you do.

00:10:47

And so I think that's really – if we're going to change the perception, we have to be more visible. I think most EAs, myself included in that role, we're used to being backstage. We're used to being behind the curtain. We're used to putting our exec on the stage, and that's normal and natural and understandable, but it's also holding us back from helping to build that understanding of what we actually do and the real value that we bring. 

Leah Warwick: Right. If only your executive knows how great you're doing, then you're not going to have that impact. You need to cultivate the visibility, the influence, and the personal-branding piece is so powerful, saying, "I am an executive operations expert." I think taking that step is not only a mindset shift; it's a confidence boost. But that's what events like this are for. A lot of people here are telling you, "You can do it." Sometimes it helps to hear it from your peers. We do have a lot of great attendees here at EA Ignite who've been doing this for 20, 25, 30 years, so they're very experienced in their field. But are you experienced with the latest tech tools? Are you experienced with the latest AI tools? You have to be on top of the latest trends and innovations if you want to continue to say, "I am experienced in all of these areas, and that's why I deserve that promotion. That's why I deserve that raise. That's why I deserve that title change, and this new role in the company."

00:12:09

I think that all of what you're saying is so, so important. And we do have a listener question submitted by one of our community members, and they wrote in: What advice do you have for maintaining a balance between AI-driven efficiency and the human touch that clients and executives value? 

Fiona Young: This is such an interesting question to me. When I saw this, actually, when you sent this before, I kind of thought, actually, I don't think that's an issue right now. I think these tools are so limited in their capabilities – they're expansive in their capabilities; let me reframe that. But they really are – I don't think there's any risk of you using the humanness of this role. These tools are really just helping you to go faster, to shortcut the process, for instance, of drafting a policy document or drafting standard operating procedures, or helping you to write that kind of tricky, human email, like a difficult email you don't want to write, and it's a Friday afternoon and you're like, "I need to do this before I close out my week."

00:13:13

But I don't really think there's a huge risk of losing the human element, so long as you are just embracing what's in front of you. And, yeah, I mean, obviously, we'll see what happens. In three years, in five years, I think probably I would answer this question very differently, and we're going to have to think very hard about how we keep the human in everything that we do, and how we don't over sort of outsource work to AI. But I think, for now, that's not really the problem. These are just tools that will help as a copilot, as a thought partner, as like an intern to help you to do the first cut of something, to get you from zero to one. But still, as humans, there's still a lot of work for us to do to get that to a place where we can take it over the line and ship it. 

00:14:00                     

Leah Warwick: Yes, absolutely. And we find, right now – who knows five, ten years from now – we're seeing that the hard skills of like AI and new technical skills, they are just as important as the soft skills or the power skills, and we need to have an equal balance. That's actually something that EAs are really great at already, like you mentioned. They do bring that human touch a lot more than other professions. I think it's a great strength. So as long as that's balanced out with the technical side, then you've got a great EA right here.

Fiona Young: Yeah, absolutely.

Leah Warwick: Thank you so much. This was a great conversation. Where can our listeners find you online?

Fiona Young: At joincarve.com, or on LinkedIn I'm very active. I have tons of free resources available there as well, if you search Fiona Young and Carve.

00:14:50                     

Leah Warwick: The advocacy that you do for this profession is extremely valued and appreciated, so thank you.

Fiona Young: Thank you, Leah, and thanks for having me as well. It's been lovely.

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Leah Warwick: Thank you for listening to "The Admin Edge," produced by the American Society of Administrative Professionals, original music and audio editing by Warwick Productions, with video and audio production at our events by 5Tool Productions. If you like this podcast, please leave us a nice review, five stars, and subscribe. If you'd like to submit a listener question, you may do so on our website at ASAPorg.com/podcast.