Shelley Fishel, The MS Office Maestro, trains EAs and PAs in Microsoft 365 and Copilot. She is also a sought-after speaker and author of 48 books which have sold over 2.5 million copies. She gives us a reassuring summary of the irreplaceable value of great assistants when we are using AI tools such as Copilot…
Sarah had ninety minutes to turn a long Teams recording into a summary for the exec team. Copilot did it in ninety seconds, which should have felt like a win. Instead, it came back confident, and wrong. It missed three minutes of silence from the COO that was the real story and buried the one important objection under two comments that didn’t matter. Copilot summarised the words. Sarah had six years of experience of reading
the room, and no transcript was going to know how to do that. That gap, between what Copilot can process and what a good PA understands, is where your real value sits.
It is not small, and it is not closing soon. Here’s how to use it to your advantage.
That gap, between what Copilot can process and what a good PA understands, is where your real value sits. It is not small, and it is not closing soon. AI tools can take care of repetitive tasks and save valuable time, but knowing how to use them effectively is becoming an essential skill for modern assistants.
1. Let AI summarise the words, but you read the room
Copilot will tell you what was said, but not always what was meant, who went quiet, or whose objection really mattered. Before you pass on an AI summary, ask what you would have noticed in the room, and add that back in.
2. Let AI draft the words, but you choose the tone
When a project ran late, an EA asked Copilot to draft an apology to the client. It came back polished and professional, and completely wrong for a relationship built on years of informal, first name emails. That polish felt cold when the moment needed warmth. She caught it, rewrote two lines by hand, and the client rang to say thank you instead of complaining. No prompt teaches a tool that kind of sensitivity.
3. Check the source before you trust the summary
Ask Copilot to summarise a long report and it may come back with something that sounds perfectly reasonable, even when the numbers don’t quite back it up. That’s the danger: it sounds confident. Before it goes anywhere near a board pack, someone needs to check it against the source. That someone is usually you. Copilot means well. It’s more like an enthusiastic puppy, tail wagging, desperate to please, bringing you exactly what it thinks you want and occasionally the wrong slipper. It saves real hours, and the best PAs check what’s been fetched before it goes out the door. Their value is no longer just in how quickly they can get words on a page, but in the judgement they bring to what gets sent, softened, or held back. That’s even more important than before.
