For the longest time, I avoided using artificial intelligence as a virtual administrative and executive assistant, but I am here right now to admit I am a convert.
These days, it seems like every website and service is adding an AI component, but the most well-known AI service right now is ChatGPT. When I first heard about it, I was unimpressed by the idea that people would be essentially asking a robot to write their content. Anytime someone shared an AI-hack, I ignored it because I felt that I could do better on my own (likely due to hearing stories about Garry Kasparov beating the computer at chess in 1985). Although it wasn’t a total 180, my feeling began to change when a client shared an example of her use of AI. She had shared a transcription of one of her podcast episodes with ChatGPT and had it produce a blog post for her. The blog post it produced reminded me of an elementary school book report - introductory paragraph, 3 body paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph - but it wasn’t half-bad. The content was there, it had substance, but it wasn’t “human.”
Not long after, I was taking a course which included an introduction to using ChatGPT for research purposes. The instructor shared how to prep the software and ask questions to get the best results. For example, I’ve always enjoyed writing, but coming up with content ideas has been a struggle for me since I started in the virtual administrative world. I can prep ChatGPT to pretend it’s the best, or most successful, _blank_ in the world, then I can ask it questions. “You are the most successful life coach in the world, what are your content pillars?” “Please create a content calendar for one month.” Again, some of the responses aren’t going to work, but there’s content, there’s substance, there’s the potential to take its responses, use them as a guide, and personalize everything to fit you and your business.
Personally, that’s the main way I have used AI to help clients, but I asked ChatGPT to share 10 ways to use AI to help clients (*the ideas in bold are from ChatGPT, but the descriptions are my own.) ~ https://bit.ly/42Jxlmo
1. Intelligent Scheduling: AI can assist with finding optimal meeting times between multiple parties which can save you time when juggling a variety of calendars.
2. Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Communication: AI can “read” and analyze your emails, messages, and documents to find the important bits and draft responses.
3. Data Analysis and Insights: if you don’t have the time to analyze your data, AI can do it for you and provide relevant insights.
4. Intelligent Document Management: AI can find the document you’re looking for, even if you can’t find it yourself.
5. Chatbot Support: As you often see on website and Facebook business pages, a chatbot can provide immediate assistance to your clients and customers when they have questions.
6. Personalized Recommendations: Seen often on Facebook especially, AI can analyze what you do, who you interact with, what you like, and more, to provide recommendations.
7. Sentiment Analysis: This one is new to me - but AI can look at how you’re being viewed across social media and the web to determine the feelings behind the mentions and give you a chance to improve if issues are found.
8. Workflow Automation: Important in project management, AI can assist with repetitive tasks so you have more time for productivity.
9. Predictive Analytics: AI can analyze data from past performance and current behaviors to predict future trends, patterns, and more.
10. Virtual Meeting Assistance: Using AI tools, your meetings can be transcribed and bullet points created to make meetings more effective.
With all of these ideas for using AI in your business, a specific question comes to mind. Do you really need a human assistant if you can use AI for so much? Can’t you just replace your executive assistant, personal assistant, or virtual assistant with AI? The answers are yes and no - you still need a human assistant who can’t be replaced by AI. Sure, AI can help with a lot of things, but you still need a human. If you take everything AI does and pass it off as your own, not only would that be disingenuous and show a lack of integrity, but eventually your business wouldn’t look, sound, or feel like you anymore. Your human assistant can take everything that AI produces and transform it so it feels like your business, so it feels like you.
That’s the key to using AI effectively: both AI and a human can give you ideas, content, data, and support, among other things, but the human can transform and personalize everything to fit your business, fit your brand, fit you. Instead of asking for AI to replace your human EA, PA, or VA, I recommend you work with someone who is willing to enhance their personal skill set with AI. Someone who is willing to see the benefits of AI and add it to their personal toolkit. Artificial intelligence is just that - artificial. When you work with a human who utilizes AI, you add in interpersonal intelligence, linguistic intelligence, emotional intelligence, and every other intelligence type that is innate in humans.
You don’t have to take it from me. I’ll let ChatGPT have the final word in this discussion: “Remember, while AI can greatly enhance productivity and efficiency, it's important to strike a balance between automation and maintaining a personal touch in your interactions with clients.”
Follow Us on Social Media