Comment by xp84

> "Most of the time is taken by..."

This reminds me of an exchange I had (this would have been 2018 or so) with a colleague I was visiting when I worked for a large retailer. She had a ton on her plate, and was in charge of running an important department. She lamented privately to me that the company had specifically banned the hiring of anyone as an "assistant." She was spending hours of her highly-paid time doing tasks similar to what you listed here, which didn't require any of her important skills, things like filling out expense reports or scheduling meetings. I could see how we were getting a lot less productivity from her because of this dogmatic idea that was no doubt done more for optics than anything else.

It seems like that company's policy is pretty much pervasive - outside the C-suite, no one has an assistant no matter how well paid they are, but we give them a ton of silly busywork to waste their time on.

To bring this back to the subject at hand, I do hope that "AI" can crack the literal "assistant" duties. If it did, it really could be a net good for society and business, given that it wouldn't even be displacing human assistants, since they just fell out of fashion in 1995 or whatever.