The EAs Who Wait Are Already Behind

Hey, I’m Sabrina

I am a Senior Executive Assistant who has spent over 20 years supporting executives in the San Francisco Bay Area. I started The Force Multiplier because I keep hearing the same fear from EAs everywhere: that Artificial Intelligence is coming for our jobs. I do not believe that, and I do not want you to believe it either. What I do believe is that this is a major turning point in our profession, and the EAs who learn to work with these tools now will be the ones who continue to be indispensable. I do not want anyone to get left behind. So here we are, together.

What to expect every week

This week

A lot of EAs I talk to are waiting for the dust to settle, waiting to see which tools stick around, and waiting until their company rolls out an official policy. I understand the instinct completely, because I have felt it myself, and we have all watched plenty of shiny new tools promise to change everything and then quietly disappear six months later. Waiting has protected us before, and that instinct is real, but this time it is not going to serve us.

Something happened to me recently that I want to share with you, because it changed how I think about this. Even after I embraced AI and built it into my week, there have been stretches where I let myself drift, whether it was a busy week, a travel week, or a stretch where I told myself I would pick it back up when things calmed down. Every single time I came back the following week, I was already behind, because new capabilities had shipped, colleagues had found workflows I had not seen yet, and the tool itself had shifted under me while I was away. One week off is all it takes right now, and I am someone who was already in it, which tells you everything you need to know about how fast this is moving.

Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, has been saying something in interviews recently that has stayed with me, which is that AI is not going to take your job, but the person who uses AI is going to take your job. I want you to sit with that for a second, because he is not being dramatic, he is describing exactly what I experienced in a single week off. The people who are building fluency with these tools are not just keeping up, they are quietly separating from the rest of us.

Our executives have already moved past the question of whether to use AI, because they are using it, their peers are using it, and seventy-one percent of organizations are now using AI across functions. Our leaders are noticing which of us are keeping up, and the gap between EAs who have built real AI fluency and EAs who are still waiting is widening faster than anything I have seen in this profession. I do not want you on the wrong side of that gap.

We have lived through this pattern before

My colleague Courtney Merrell, a Senior Executive Operations Partner at Gusto, said something on LinkedIn recently that has stuck with me, which is that our role has evolved from secretary to administrative assistant to executive assistant, and now to operations partner. She is right, and I want to sit with that for a minute, because we have lived through this pattern before and it tells us exactly what to expect next.

Every one of those title changes was driven by a technology shift. The shift from secretary to administrative assistant happened before my time, driven by the arrival of personal computers on desks, which absorbed the typing and filing and expanded the scope of the role. When I started in this work, most of us were called administrative assistants, and the tools of the era defined what we did. When email and calendaring software took over, the role changed again, and the title shifted to executive assistant, which reflected a scope that now included managing information flow and protecting the executive's time and attention.

The most recent shift, and the one I am living inside of right now, is the evolution from executive assistant to executive operations partner, which is the title I hold today. This shift has been happening quietly at forward-thinking companies for the last several years, and it reflects a scope that has expanded again to include strategic planning, project management, and all of the traditional executive support work in a more elevated form. Operations partners are expected to think about the business, not just manage the calendar, and we are expected to own outcomes rather than only own tasks. That shift happened before AI arrived, but AI is going to accelerate it dramatically, which is the part worth paying attention to.

Each of those shifts had the same two groups of people, which were the assistants who leaned into the new technology early and helped shape what the role became, and the assistants who held onto the old way of working and watched the floor quietly shift underneath them, until over five or ten years they found themselves doing a smaller version of a job that used to be bigger. That is the part nobody warned them about, which is that the change did not happen overnight but happened gradually, and by the time it was obvious, catching up was a lot harder.

AI is the next one of these shifts, and the title that is forming around it is already taking shape. It is the operations partner who can orchestrate AI, filter what it produces, and spend the time they reclaim on work that actually moves the business. That seat is being built right now, and the EAs and operations partners who are experimenting with AI today are the ones who will fill it.

Something concrete has been on my mind since I saw it last week, which is a job posting I came across at a major technology company for a role called Senior Executive Technology Specialist, with a pay range of ninety-eight thousand to one hundred and forty-eight thousand dollars. The role is not technically an EA position, but when I read the description I realized the work it describes is the work a genuinely AI-fluent EA already does, including building documentation and runbooks for executive workflows, proactively monitoring and anticipating what the executive will need, owning meeting reliability and room readiness, and orchestrating the technology that sits underneath all of it. The company is not replacing their EA, they are hiring a separate specialist to fill the gap that exists because most EAs have not yet built AI fluency. That is the whole story right there, because companies without AI-fluent EAs end up paying six figures for a second hire to do the work, while companies with AI-fluent EAs already have that person in the building and just do not know it yet. The market has started to price this skill set, and you have a choice about which side of that pricing you want to be on.

The skills AI is worst at are the exact skills we have spent our careers developing, and this is the part I want you to really take in. Reading a room, anticipating what the executive will need before they know they need it, knowing which message needs a phone call instead of an email, translating half a sentence into a full plan, and knowing the difference between a fire and a distraction are all things that judgment cannot be downloaded or prompted, and that judgment is the moat AI cannot cross. Soft skills alone are not going to set you apart anymore, and I know that might not be what you were hoping to hear from me, because every good EA already has them. The difference between the EAs who will define the next version of this role and the ones who will watch it pass them by is soft skills plus AI fluency, where your judgment is the moat and your AI fluency is the multiplier that lets that judgment scale, which means you need both.

On the fear underneath all of this

Something does not get said out loud often enough, and I want to name it here. A lot of us are hearing AI talked about at our companies as a way to do more with less, whether that means less headcount, less overhead, or less support, and when an EA is asked to build workflows that automate parts of her own role, there is a reasonable fear that she is being asked to participate in something that will eventually be used against her. I understand that fear, and I am not going to pretend it is irrational.

Something I have come to believe, though, is that refusing to engage with AI does not protect you from that outcome but makes that outcome more likely, because the EA who has not built fluency is exactly the EA whose role is easiest to justify cutting when the conversation turns to efficiency. The EA who has built fluency is the one who shows up to that conversation with a different argument entirely, which is that she is the person who can operate AI across the entire executive office in a way that nobody else at the company can, and that cutting her role is the most expensive mistake the company could make.

The play is not to refuse, it is to engage so thoroughly and so visibly that you become the person leadership cannot imagine running their office without, and that is harder than refusing but is also the only move that actually works.

If you do not know where to start, start here

The other thing I hear constantly is paralysis, whether it sounds like "I do not even know what to ask it" or "I do not know what it can actually do for my role," and that is fair, because nobody handed us a playbook. Here is one prompt that will break you out of the stall, which you can open your AI tool of choice and paste in, filling in the brackets with your real situation and then having a conversation with it.

Here is the prompt to run today:

That last line is the whole game, because it turns a one-shot answer into a real conversation. Most EAs ask AI "what can you do?" and get a generic list back, whereas this prompt forces the AI to contextualize against your executive and your actual workload, and then it keeps asking until it understands you. What you have in front of you at that point is not a tool you are using but a thinking partner you are building a relationship with.

Here is the part nobody tells you, which is that you will not figure out how to use AI by reading about AI, you figure it out by using it. Every real use case I have for AI in my work came from experimenting with it on something small and noticing what it was surprisingly good at, which is why the prompt above is a starting point rather than a finish line. Use it, push on it, and try the same task three different ways, because the ideas for how to use AI come from the reps you put in with it.

A note worth saying out loud

One thing about this role rarely gets named, and I think it should be. Every person around your executive in a given week is advocating for something, whether it is their team, their budget, their roadmap, or their next milestone, and that is normal and it is how organizations work. The EA is often the only person in that orbit whose entire job is simply making the executive and the organization successful, with no competing loyalty, no personal agenda, and just clear-eyed connection of the dots across every function, every meeting, every signal. In an era where AI is reshaping who does what across the business, the operator whose only loyalty is to the executive's success becomes more valuable, not less, and that is worth remembering, especially for the leaders lucky enough to work with someone like that.

Your move this week

Run the prompt above, have the conversation, and pick one suggestion to try on real work this week. You do not need a certification, a course, or permission from IT, you need reps with the tool.

If you want a head start, I built a free starter prompt library for subscribers, which includes prompts I use every week for briefing prep, inbox triage, meeting recaps, and the other work that eats our days, and the full library is available for EAs who want the whole toolkit.

Here is why I believe in the library so much, which is that a prompt producing a mediocre result today might produce an excellent one in three months, because the models are improving that fast. The prompt itself is not the asset, but your ongoing library of what you have tried, what worked, and what did not quite work yet is the asset, because when a capability catches up to an idea you had six months ago, you will already have the prompt written, the context ready, and the experience to know what good output should look like. That is how you stay ahead of the curve instead of chasing it, because tools will keep changing, and a strong prompt library is the skill and the infrastructure that carries across whatever AI does next.

→ Grab the free starter library at theforcemultiplier.co

Coming up next issue

Next week we are tackling the thing you have been meaning to do for years, which is documenting your work so you can actually leave. AI makes it a one-afternoon project now.

You are built for this work, and I mean that.

Please do not wait on the sidelines while the rest of us figure it out.

Come figure it out with us.

Go multiply.

Sabrina

The Force Multiplier