By Lily Shippen, Founder, eavolve
A couple of weeks ago we ran the first eavolve Future Ready EA & PA Training Day in Holborn. Seven EAs and PAs spent the day with Emily Partridge, Alice Garside and me, and a few of them had come down from Manchester on an early train to be there, which tells you how much appetite there is for getting this right. I want to share what I took from it, partly because we are announcing new London and Manchester dates soon, and partly because it confirmed something I have believed for a while, which is that the question everyone keeps asking about AI is the wrong one.
Everyone is asking the same question
Hardly a week goes by without a headline about AI replacing assistants, and I understand why people feel uneasy. Scheduling, inbox triage and first drafts are exactly the sort of thing these tools are good at. What the headlines miss is that those tasks were never the job. They are the part of the job other people can see, and for a long time they have been the only part most organisations have measured. What makes a high-level EA valuable is the judgement underneath, the knowing what not to put in an email and what to raise in person instead, and I have yet to see a tool come anywhere near that. I wrote about this in more detail in will AI replace the Executive Assistant role? and the day in Holborn only made me more certain.
Two very different starting points in one room
The thing that struck me most was how varied the group was. Some people in the room were already using AI every day, in so much of what they did that it had stopped being a tool and become just how they worked. Others were keen but had not found a way in yet. I had wondered beforehand whether that mix would be awkward. It turned out to be the best thing about the day, because the people further along had real examples to share and the people starting out asked the questions the confident users had stopped asking themselves.
The pain points took over, and we let them
We had not planned to spend as long as we did on what was getting in people’s way, but once one person described theirs, everyone else recognised something of their own in it, so we gave it the time it deserved. We did not try to solve those problems in the room either. Emily, Alice and I took them away, and each person’s follow-up includes our honest view on how AI could realistically help with the specific things they raised. That matters because no two assistants in the room had the same job. What would help someone supporting a founder in a scale-up isn’t what would help a PA in a large organisation, and I think that’s where a lot of generic AI courses fall down.
Where I think this is going
Everyone in that room could feel the shift, and the more I think about it the more I believe AI isn’t threatening the EA role so much as exposing it. For years the value of an assistant has been judged on the part of the job that’s visible, the diary, the inbox, the travel, the pack that went out on time, while the judgement that made all of it work went unseen, often by the very person being supported. Once a tool can do the visible part, the invisible part is the job, and the assistants who are leaning in have understood that. They’re handing the tasks to the tool and keeping the decisions, which is what the best EAs I’ve worked with have always done, and in most cases their executives haven’t caught up with what that now makes possible.
The assistants I worry about aren’t the ones who haven’t opened a tool yet, but the ones whose role has been defined by the visible work for so long that nobody around them, sometimes including them, has the language for the rest of it. We were clear when we designed Future Ready that it would not be a prompting course, because anyone can learn to write a better prompt in an afternoon. The harder part is knowing which parts of your role to hand over, which to keep firmly in human hands, and how to explain that judgement to the person you support, because if you can’t explain it, it stays invisible, and invisible work is the kind that gets questioned when budgets are tight.
What happens next
Future Ready is a small-group, in-person AI training day for EAs and PAs at any stage with AI, from people who have never opened a tool to people who use one daily and want to go further. New London and Manchester dates are coming and you can see them first on our upcoming training dates page, or read the full outline of the Future Ready EA & PA Training Day.
If you would rather talk it through first, book a discovery call and one of us will call you back.
Lily Shippen is the Founder of eavolve, the UK training and development company for Executive Assistants, Personal Assistants and Chiefs of Staff, which she founded in Manchester in 2024 with Emily Partridge. eavolve runs the EA & PA Strategy Training Day and the Future Ready EA & PA Training Day in London and Manchester, alongside one-to-one career coaching and Chief of Staff programmes.
Contact details:
Telephone: +44 7547 404164
Email: [email protected]
Website: https://eavolve.co.uk
