Valentina Akpan: Founder, Rellatech. Admin and technical virtual assistant for businesses and startups with teams.
The World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2025 lists administrative assistants and executive secretaries among the roles expected to see the largest absolute decline by 2030. The driver is straightforward: the routine work at the bottom of the role, like scheduling coordination, data entry, and basic correspondence. Meanwhile the American Society of Administrative Professionals annual report found admin professionals citing AI adoption jumped from 26 percent in 2024 to 77 percent this year.
Read those two data points together and the picture gets clearer: the role is splitting rather than dying.
The bottom of the role is shrinking
Calendar Tetris, meeting rescheduling, formatting travel itineraries, moving data between systems, drafting the fifth version of the same holiday email. All of it is now cheaper and faster for AI to do than for a human. That work is not coming back to a job description. The WEF number is measuring that.
The top of the role is growing
At the same time, demand at the senior end is holding or rising. Strategic inbox management, briefing an executive for a stakeholder call, owning a cross-functional project end to end, running the CRM as a business tool rather than a contact list. These are judgement jobs, and AI does not do judgement jobs on its own. AI literacy has become a baseline hiring screen for these roles, but it is a screen, not the job.
This is the version of the role I run inside executive virtual assistant retainers. AI drafts, an operator decides. AI schedules, an operator protects the priorities. AI writes the first pass of a follow-up, an operator makes sure it sounds like the person it is signed by.
What this means for hiring
If you are hiring for a task-doer in 2026, you are hiring against automation and losing. If you are hiring for an operator who runs the AI, you are hiring the person who makes the whole business run. Same role title on paper, completely different job.
For most of the businesses I work with, the direct answer is not a full-time hire at either end. It is a monthly retainer for the operator layer, so they get the judgement without the seat.
Work with Rellatech
I run monthly retainers for businesses that need the senior end of this role: judgement, systems ownership, and AI supervision. See the retainer tiers, or a short call is the fastest way to see whether it's a fit.
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