Valentina Akpan: Founder, Rellatech. Admin and technical virtual assistant for businesses and startups with teams.
The biggest companies in the world have started treating assistants as standard issue. Theirs are made of software.
Earlier this month, Fortune reported that Cisco is rolling out personalized AI agents to all of its roughly 90,000 employees, starting with the company's new fiscal year at the end of July. Each employee gets an assistant that can handle tasks, answer questions, and route requests to whichever AI model fits the job.
Cisco CFO Mark Patterson told Fortune the company built much of the infrastructure on premises to keep costs and data under its own control, and that the system picks the cheapest capable model for each task instead of sending everything to the most expensive one. Patterson also said AI now produces 80 to 90 percent of the first draft of the management discussion section in Cisco's regulatory filings.
Customer Experience Magazine reported that the agents are arriving in the same window as close to 4,000 job cuts globally, with more than 400 terminations announced in California starting July 13. The same month employees receive their new assistant, thousands of their colleagues are leaving.
When a Fortune 500 company decides that every employee, from engineers to finance, needs help with routing, questions, and admin, it is admitting what the businesses I support already know. Nobody does their best work buried in admin.
The difference is scale. Cisco can build its own AI stack and absorb the mistakes while the system learns. A business without that kind of budget cannot. When an agent books the wrong meeting or sends a half right answer inside a company that size, a process catches it. In a smaller business, the owner catches it, usually late at night, usually after the client has already seen it.
I use AI tools in my work every day and they help. But the businesses I support do not need 90,000 agents. They need one person who knows their tools, their clients, and their standards, and who brings in automation where it fits. My executive assistant services and operations support are built for that: a person handling the work with good systems behind them.
What to do with this news
Watch the enterprise rollouts, take what is useful, skip the rest. If your team is spending the week on inboxes, scheduling, CRM upkeep, and follow up, the answer is not an enterprise AI program. My monthly retainers give businesses and startups with teams a dedicated assistant who runs the day to day, folds in automation where it makes sense, and keeps a person watching the work. If you want to see what that looks like for your setup, book a consultation and I will map it out with you.
Contact MeNot ready for a call? Take the free operations assessment and I will send you a written breakdown within 24 hours.