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Technicians and associate professionals · code 3343

Administrative and executive secretaries

AI can manage the diary. Knowing which meeting really matters is still an assistant.

AI could take a fair chunk of five of the eight tasks, including booking meetings and travel and producing word-for-word records. Supervising clerical staff and liaising with colleagues are mostly out of its reach.

What they actually do (and what else they get called)

Administrative and executive secretaries perform liaison, coordination and organizational tasks in support of managers and professionals and/or prepare correspondence, reports and records of proceedings and other specialized documentation. Tasks include - (a) drafting administrative correspondence and minutes; (b) obtaining, proposing and monitoring deadlines and follow-up dates; (c) screening requests for meetings, scheduling and organizing meetings and travel arrangements; (d) assisting in the preparation of budgets, monitoring of expenditures, drafting of contracts and purchasing or acquisition orders; (e) liaising with other staff about a range of matters relating to the organization’s operations; (f) writing and answering business or technical letters and other similar correspondence; (g) preparing verbatim reports of proceedings in legislative assemblies, courts of law or other places, using shorthand or specialized office equipment. (h) supervising the work of clerical support workers. Examples of the occupations classified here: - Administrative secretary - Correspondence assistant - Court reporter - Executive assistant - Personal assistant Some related occupations classified elsewhere: - Medical transcriptionist - 3344 - Secretary (general) - 4120

  • executive assistant
  • administrative assistant
  • editorial assistant
  • scopist
  • management assistant

Job titles from the EU's ESCO list. Search for any of them on the jobs page and you'll end up here.

46 / 100

Changing significantly

AI could do a real share of the everyday tasks. The job is changing shape, not vanishing.

Not the odds you keep your job. It's how much of the everyday work still needs a person, out of 100.

← Robot's turf Human's turf →

The ILO's official verdict: Exposed: Gradient 3

391 of 427 for holding up against AI

Why this score?

The ILO rated each of this job's 8 tasks for how much of it AI could do. They average 53.6 out of 100, so it holds up at 100 − 53.6 = 46.4.

That's the whole sum. No black box, no secret sauce: you can check it against the ILO's study. ILO group “Exposed: Gradient 3”: Most of the tasks are affected.

This job rates 27.9 out of 100 for how hands-on it is. The score above only looks at AI tools, not robots, but for work this far from the physical that matters less.

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.8-observed-use

Man v Bot · compare

Who holds up better?

Administrative and executive secretaries 46

v

Go on, try your partner's job. Or your sibling's. We won't tell.

Man v Bot

Where the bot helps, and where the human wins

Bot

What AI takes

The routine stuff. You may not miss it.

  • Diaries and travel.
  • Correspondence.
  • Minutes and transcripts.

Man

What people still do better

Judgement, trust and skilled hands. Hard to download.

  • Judgement about priorities.
  • Handling confidential matters.
  • Relationships across the organisation.

Both

What's arriving

New work that only exists because the AI does.

  • AI assistants and agents.
  • Managing AI tools for executives.
  • Project and operations roles.

Written by a human, from the ILO's task ratings below. Yes, we see the irony. Read it as one person's take.

Meet your two rivals

They're not the same machine. AI software can only reach the parts of a job done on a screen or in words. A chatbot can't climb a ladder. A robot might, one day, if it doesn't fall off.

The AI

Lives in a screen. Never had to fix a boiler.

Threat level: High

70 could do without you

It could take over a lot of this job on its own. It could help with 71 of 100.

The robot

The wildcard. Has hands, still working out stairs.

How much it matters here: Lower

28 how hands-on

Not much of this job needs hands, so the robot can sit this one out.

So could a robot do the physical part?

Less than half of this job is hands-on. Robots still matter, but for a smaller part of the work, so we don't sort it any further.

Robots hate fiddly work in awkward spaces. On that measure, this job scores 23 out of 100. The higher it is, the longer the robot waits.

28 How
hands-on
23 How fiddly
and cramped

Kind of hands-on work Less than half hands-on

The small print

They aren't a robot score, and nothing on this page is. Nobody measures how far robots have got well enough to put a number on it. These are the closest thing we have: how hands-on the job is, and how much fiddly, cramped work it takes, which is what Frey and Osborne found hardest for machines.

From O*NET, averaged across 2 US jobs .

finger skill 37.5 · hand skill 22.3 · cramped spaces 8.1 · averaged · rule: hands-on under 50

estimated O*NET 31.0 BLS occupational crosswalk chain ISCO-08 to 2010 SOC (Aug 2012, rev. Jun 2015); 2010 to 2018 SOC (Nov 2017); O*NET-SOC 2019 taxonomy data 0.8-observed-use measures chosen by Frey & Osborne (2017) · the grouping is a sorting, not a measurement

The job, task by task

Every job is really a bundle of tasks. Here's this one unpacked, with how much of each AI could do, out of 100. The score is the average, and averages can hide a lot.

AI's favourite task here scores 72, against an average of 54. The bigger the gap, the more lopsided the job: some of it wide open to AI, some of it barely touched.

  1. 72

    Screening requests for meetings, and scheduling and organizing meetings and travel arrangements

    Medium
  2. 65

    Preparing verbatim reports of proceedings in legislative assemblies, courts of law or other places using shorthand or specialized office equipment.

    Medium
  3. 63

    Writing and answering business or technical letters and other similar correspondence

    Medium
  4. 60

    Obtaining, proposing and monitoring deadlines and follow-up dates

    Medium
  5. 59

    Drafting administrative correspondence and minutes

    Medium
  6. 46

    Assisting in the preparation of budgets, monitoring of expenditures, drafting of contracts and purchasing or acquisition orders

    Low
  7. 35

    Supervising the work of clerical support workers.

    Low
  8. 32

    Liaising with other staff about a range of matters relating to the organization’s operations

    Low

8 tasks · the High to Very Low labels are the ILO's

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.8-observed-use

Sidekick or replacement?

A tool that makes you faster is a very different thing from one that does the task while you watch. Jobs and Skills Australia measured the two separately, which is handy.

AI helps you
71
AI does it for you
70

Sidekick wins, by 1 points.

How good a match is this?

3 Australian jobs match this one, and we've simply averaged them. Treat the numbers as a rough guide.

estimated Our Gen AI Transition (Gen AI Capacity Study) September 2025 detailed data release data 0.8-observed-use matched to Australian jobs 5211, 5212, 5321

Meanwhile, in real life…

Everything else here is about what AI could do. This is what people actually did. When they asked Claude for help with this kind of work, did they hand the whole task over, or roll their sleeves up and work through it together?

Out of every 100 conversations

43
57

worked through it together handed it over

The small print

Anthropic publishes this about its own product, and it doesn't feed into any score here. These are people who use Claude, not workers in general, so little use here doesn't mean AI can't reach the job. This job makes up 0.3% of the conversations.

The data is sorted by US job, and this one matches 2 of them. We've combined them, counting each by how often it comes up in the conversations, so the busiest one counts most.

These two add up to 100. The bars elsewhere on the page don't, because each is scored on its own, so we don't put them side by side.

observed use Anthropic Economic Index release 2026-06-26, period beginning 2026-05-01 data 0.8-observed-use 2026-05-01 · Anthropic, about its own product

So, should executive assistants be worried?

Short answer: not worried, but paying attention. The job is changing.

Much of the job is exposed. Scheduling, verbatim reports, correspondence, deadlines and minutes are rated Medium; budgets, supervision and liaising with staff are Low. AI assistants take on scheduling and drafting; trust and judgement stay human.

Worth remembering: we score tasks, not jobs. When AI takes on a task, the job usually reshuffles around it rather than vanishing.

Where this job could lead

None of the new jobs we've written up start from here yet. Could be you're the first. See the jobs AI is creating →

How are the neighbours doing?

There are 82 jobs in the “Technicians and associate professionals” family, averaging 66. This one is below the family average.

Pit this against any other job →