Comment by jimbokun
1 day ago
A lot of people would love to have a 1970s secretary capable of responding to many mundane requests without any guidance.
1 day ago
A lot of people would love to have a 1970s secretary capable of responding to many mundane requests without any guidance.
I have a large part of that though. The computer (outlook today) just schedules meetings rooms for me ensuring there are not multiple different meetings in it at the same time. I can schedule my own flights.
When I first started working the company rolled out the first version of meeting scheduling (it wasn't outlook), and all the other engineers loved it - finally they could figure out how to schedule our own meetings instead of having the secretary do it. Apparently the old system was some mainframe based things other programmers couldn't figure out (I never worked with it so I can't comment on how it was). Likewise scheduling a plane ticket involved calling travel agents and spending a lot of time on hold.
If you are a senior executive you still have a secretary. However by the 1970s the secretary for most of us would be department secretary that handled 20-40 people not just our needs, and thus wasn't in tune with all those details. However most of us don't have any needs that are not better handled by a computer today.
I would too, but I would have to trust AI at least as much as a 1970s secretary not to mess up basic facts about myself or needlessly embellish/summarize my conversations with known correspondents. Comparing agents and past office cliches was not to imply agents do it and it's stupid; I'm implying agents claim to do it, but don't.
So AI is SaaS (Secretary as a Service)