How AI Is Erasing the Executive Assistant, One of the Office's Oldest Jobs

The executive assistant role is being quietly dismantled, and the people who hold it deserve a clear answer about what comes next. As Fast Company reported, drawing on Bloomberg reporting, firms like PwC and McKinsey are cutting or relocating support roles that once paid more than 100,000 dollars a year, because the work of managing diaries, expenses, and travel is exactly the kind of repetitive, rules-based task AI tools absorb fastest. At Metaintro, we track how the biggest employers reshape their teams so you can move before the market reprices your skills, the same pattern we saw when AI rewired hiring across finance. Here is what is actually happening, who is most exposed, how fast the change is moving, and the concrete moves that turn an admin background into a more secure, better-paid job.

Is The Executive Assistant Job Really Disappearing?

The short answer is that it is shrinking and changing shape at the same time, not vanishing overnight. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that overall employment of secretaries and administrative assistants will show little or no change from 2024 to 2034, with the category holding about 3.5 million jobs in 2024 and roughly 358,300 openings each year, most of them just replacing people who retire or switch careers. That headline number hides the real story.

Underneath it, the BLS expects medical secretaries to grow on the back of healthcare demand while other administrative roles decline or stay flat, with the agency itself naming AI productivity gains as the force dampening labor demand. The high-paying corporate executive assistant, the one attached to a partner or a C-suite leader, sits squarely in the declining bucket. So the category survives on paper, but the specific job that paid the most is the one under the most pressure.

Which Companies Are Cutting Executive Assistants?

The professional-services world is leading the way, and the names are familiar. According to Bloomberg, PwC's US arm laid off about 600 executive assistants, recruiters, and other support staff in February, while EY and McKinsey have relocated assistants either to lower-cost states or out of the country entirely. The same report notes the pressure is spreading into banks and law firms, where partner support has long been a stable career.

This is not a fringe trend. The Big Four firms, Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG, have all rolled out internal AI assistants for staff over the past 18 months and trimmed back-office headcount in the same window. PwC went as far as a billion-dollar generative AI investment and a deal to put ChatGPT-based tools in front of its workforce. McKinsey, for its part, has already cut around 200 technology and support staff as its own tools scaled, a move we unpacked in our look at the firm's AI-driven consulting cuts. When a single role gets automated at four of the largest employers of admin professionals at once, it stops looking like a cost decision at one company and starts looking like a structural shift across an entire occupation. We covered the broader pattern in our breakdown of why companies keep pinning 2026 layoffs on AI.

What Exactly Is AI Taking Over From Assistants?

The tasks being automated are the ones that fill an assistant's calendar. Scheduling across time zones, triaging an overflowing inbox, drafting routine replies, booking travel, reconciling expenses, taking meeting notes, and formatting documents are now handled, at least in first-draft form, by AI tools embedded in everyday software. These are repetitive and rules-based, which is the precise profile that automation chews through first, a dynamic we explored in how AI is reshaping office work.

The scale inside firms is striking. McKinsey reports that its internal generative AI platform, Lilli, now reaches more than 75 percent of its roughly 43,000 employees on a monthly basis, with 72 percent of the firm active on it and colleagues reporting up to 30 percent time savings on searching and synthesizing information. When that much knowledge work shifts onto a tool, the support layer built to handle it gets thinner. The work has not disappeared, but the number of humans needed to do it has dropped sharply.

Who Is Most Exposed, And Who Is Safer?

Exposure tracks how much of the job is execution versus judgment. The assistant whose day is mostly processing, calendar management, data entry, expense reports, and standard correspondence, faces the steepest risk. The World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report names clerical and secretarial workers, including administrative assistants and executive secretaries, among the roles expected to see the largest decline in absolute numbers this decade, alongside data entry clerks and bank tellers. The same report flags AI and information processing as the single most transformative technology cited by employers, which is exactly why these roles are first in line.

Safer ground belongs to assistants who already operate as partners rather than processors. People who run projects, manage budgets, handle sensitive relationships, coordinate across teams, and exercise discretion on behalf of a leader are doing work AI cannot own, because it carries accountability and context. A scheduling tool can find an open slot, but it cannot decide which meeting matters most to a leader's week or smooth over a tense conversation between two departments. That distinction matters for your next move. As Lacey Kaelani, CEO of Metaintro, told People Managing People, "AI is not completely eliminating roles, but instead restructuring roles and therefore slowing hiring for some jobs." The restructured version of the assistant role is the one worth aiming at.

How Fast Is This Change Actually Moving?

Faster than most workers expect, but with enough runway to act if you start now. The World Economic Forum estimates that job disruption will equal about 22 percent of all jobs by 2030, with technology reshaping or replacing tasks across nearly every desk role between now and the end of the decade. For executive assistants, the cuts are already arriving in waves rather than all at once, beginning at the firms with the deepest AI budgets and spreading outward to mid-size companies as off-the-shelf tools improve. The February layoffs at PwC were not the end of the trend, they were an early marker of it.

The realistic timeline looks something like this. Over the next 12 to 24 months, expect hiring to slow first, with open assistant roles quietly going unfilled rather than mass layoffs grabbing headlines. Over a longer horizon of three to five years, the routine, single-leader support job becomes scarce while hybrid roles that blend coordination, operations, and AI oversight multiply. The takeaway is not to panic, it is to use the window. The workers who reposition while they still hold a job and a paycheck have far more leverage than those who wait until the role disappears underneath them.

Why Did This Job Pay So Well In The First Place?

It helps to understand the value being repriced. According to BLS wage data, executive secretaries and executive administrative assistants earned a mean annual wage around 73,680 dollars, well above the roughly 47,460 dollars median for secretaries and administrative assistants overall, and at top finance and consulting firms the figure crossed 100,000 dollars with bonuses. That premium existed because a great executive assistant bought back an executive's time and protected their focus, which is genuinely valuable.

The premium is now being split. AI captures the routine slice cheaply, so firms are unwilling to pay six figures for tasks software can approximate. What stays valuable is the human judgment layer, knowing which meeting actually matters, reading a room, managing a crisis, and acting as a trusted extension of a leader. The lesson is to make that judgment layer the center of how you describe and sell your work, because that is the part the market still pays a premium for. If most of your resume reads like a list of tools and tasks, that is the first thing to rewrite.

Which Roles Should Executive Assistants Pivot Into?

The strongest pivots build directly on what an experienced assistant already does. The first and most natural is chief of staff, a seat that has expanded sharply as leaders look for a trusted operator to run the rhythm of their organization. The Chief of Staff Network reports a nearly 30 percent jump in chief-of-staff roles since 2019, with more than 7,200 new hires in 2024 alone, and an assistant who already manages a leader's priorities, relationships, and calendar holds much of the raw material the job demands.

The second path is operations and revenue operations, where the work is coordinating people, process, and tools toward a measurable outcome. An assistant who has kept a leadership team aligned has done a lighter version of this for years. The third is project and program coordination, which rewards the exact organizational instinct that made a good assistant indispensable, now applied to deliverables and deadlines rather than diaries. The fourth is the AI-enabled support role itself, a redesigned version of the job where you supervise the scheduling, note-taking, and triage tools rather than performing each task by hand. Each of these moves trades task execution for judgment and coordination, which is precisely the trade the market is now rewarding.

What Does This Mean For Your Career In 2026?

Here is the practical playbook if your background is in administrative or executive support. First, audit your week honestly and count how many hours go to tasks AI can already do. Treat that number as your runway, not your identity, and start shifting toward work that involves decisions, coordination, and people. Second, learn to direct the tools instead of competing with them, because an assistant who can build a scheduling workflow, set up an AI meeting-notes system, or manage prompts for a team becomes the person who runs the automation rather than the person it replaces. We laid out the broader case in the human skills AI cannot replace.

Third, pick one of the pivot lanes above and start building toward it now, while you still have the stability of a current role. Volunteer for the project that stretches you toward operations or chief-of-staff work, and let that experience reshape your title and your resume. Fourth, quantify your wins by tracking the hours you save, the projects you keep on track, and the problems you head off, then put those numbers on your resume in place of a task list. Fifth, keep building, because the WEF projects that 39 percent of workers' core skills will be outdated or transformed by 2030, so steady reskilling is the norm now, not a one-time fix. Our guide on older workers turning AI into an upskilling edge shows it is far from too late at any stage of a career.

Is The Whole Office Admin Field At Risk?

It is being transformed rather than erased, and the shift is uneven. The WEF Future of Jobs report projects 92 million roles displaced and 170 million created globally by 2030, a net gain of 78 million, with 86 percent of employers expecting AI and information processing to transform their business this decade. Routine clerical work shrinks while roles that supervise, coordinate, and apply judgment grow. That is the same restructuring playing out in consulting, and we tracked a parallel version in how AI is reshaping work across the workforce.

For admin professionals, the takeaway is empathetic but direct. Losing a role to automation is not a reflection of your worth or effort, and many of the firms cutting these jobs are doing so while still leaning on the institutional knowledge those workers hold. The opportunity is to carry that knowledge into a higher-leverage seat. The people who track where the hiring is actually moving, into operations, project coordination, and AI-enabled support, will get first claim on the roles opening up, often before the wider market catches on. If you are weighing a move, our look at supporting career growth when teams are overwhelmed is a useful place to start.

Related Articles

• JPMorgan Is Betting on AI Hires Over Bankers
• McKinsey Cuts 200 Staff as AI Reshapes White-Collar Work
• 5 Human Skills AI Cannot Replace, and How to Build Them
• How AI Is Shifting Office Jobs as ChatGPT Reaches Microsoft Office
• Intuit Lays Off 3,000 Workers in an AI Pivot
• Older Workers Have an AI Upskilling Edge
• 85% of Workers Cannot Connect AI Training to Their Job
• How to Support Employee Career Growth When Everyone Is Overwhelmed
• A CEO's Guide to Adopting AI Without Losing the Workforce

People Also Asked

Q: Is AI really replacing executive assistants in 2026?

A: AI is taking over the most repetitive parts of the job, scheduling, inbox triage, expenses, and travel booking, and that is driving real cuts. Bloomberg reported that PwC eliminated about 600 support staff in February while McKinsey and EY relocated assistants to lower-cost locations. The role is not gone everywhere, but the high-paying corporate version is shrinking fast as firms scale internal AI tools.

Q: What jobs can an executive assistant move into?

A: The strongest pivots build on skills assistants already have. Chief of staff, operations and project coordination, office or workplace management, and AI-enabled support roles all reward the judgment, relationships, and organizational knowledge that experienced assistants bring. The key is to lead with decision-making and coordination on your resume, not task execution, since that is the work AI cannot own.

Q: How can administrative workers protect their careers from AI?

A: Audit how much of your week is automatable and shift toward judgment-heavy work, learn to direct AI tools rather than compete with them, and quantify the time and problems you save in measurable terms. The World Economic Forum projects 39 percent of core skills will be transformed by 2030, so treating reskilling as ongoing, and aiming at roles that are growing, is the most reliable protection.

Your administrative experience is a foundation, not a ceiling, and the right next move is closer than it looks. With Metaintro, you can see which operations, coordination, and AI-enabled roles are hiring now and how your skills map to them. Create your free Metaintro profile and get matched to opportunities built for the AI-era workforce.