Unprecedented Adaptation Isn't New to Executive Support.
Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and one of the world's most influential technology leaders, has published a significant new essay on the transition to artificial intelligence. In The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical, Gates argues that this technological shift will be fundamentally different from those that came before it. In an interview discussing the essay, he described society as adjusting to a “completely unprecedented set of capabilities.”
For executive support professionals, working through unprecedented change is already familiar.
During COVID, established ways of working changed almost overnight. Executives were suddenly leading remotely, travel stopped, meetings moved online and communication and decision-making had to adapt quickly. With no established way forward, executive support professionals drew on capabilities already central to the profession: connecting people, interpreting information, solving unfamiliar problems and helping leaders and organizations continue to operate through uncertainty.
AI is a very different kind of disruption, but that experience provides a useful point of reference. It demonstrated the profession's capacity to adapt when established ways of working no longer provide all the answers.
This time, adaptability will need to go further.
This time, the work itself may change
During COVID, much of the challenge involved adapting how work was performed. AI has the potential to change the work itself.
Gates argues that previous technological changes may not provide a reliable guide to what happens next because AI can increasingly perform cognitive work that has traditionally required people. For executive support, the implications are already visible.
AI can draft communication, summarize meetings, research and analyze information, prepare documents, identify patterns and automate routine work. Increasingly, professionals can also build AI agents and automated workflows that perform repeatable work rather than simply assist with individual tasks.
Those capabilities will continue to develop, which means the professional conversation needs to move beyond asking what AI will be able to do and toward a more important question:
What will executive support professionals need to become better at doing?
Professional capability matters more than the task
Executive support at its strongest has never been simply a collection of tasks. The work requires understanding context and recognizing what matters, navigating competing priorities, communicating with different stakeholders and understanding relationships across organizational and cultural boundaries.
It would be tempting to respond to AI by identifying these capabilities as the things technology cannot do. That would be a mistake. Gates specifically challenges the assumption that there will be a convenient point at which AI simply stops becoming more capable.
Professional development cannot be built around protecting today's tasks or identifying areas of work assumed to be beyond AI. A more useful discussion is how AI capability and executive support capability come together in the work.
The comparison is not intended to draw a permanent boundary between human and AI capability. The more important consideration is how professional capability develops alongside it.
That development goes beyond learning to use AI tools. Executive support professionals can increasingly move from performing work, to using AI to improve work, and increasingly to designing AI-enabled ways of working.
Building an AI agent or automated workflow illustrates the difference. The technology may make automation possible, but professional capability is needed to understand the work, determine what should be automated, provide the appropriate context, identify where human review is required and evaluate whether the outcome actually creates value.
A poorly designed process does not become a better process simply because AI performs it.
What adaptability requires now
The executive support profession does not need a definitive prediction about what the role will look like in five or ten years before responding. It does, however, need to recognize that professional development based primarily on becoming better and faster at today's work is no longer enough.
As the nature of work changes, capabilities such as communication, influence, critical thinking, stakeholder management, cultural intelligence, professional discernment and understanding context become increasingly important. These capabilities do not sit in opposition to AI. They influence how effectively it is applied within the realities of executive and organizational work.
That is where the experience of COVID remains relevant. The lesson is not that executive support will automatically adapt to AI because it adapted to another period of disruption. The circumstances are fundamentally different.
The lesson is that adaptability is itself a professional capability, and professional capability can be developed.
Technology will continue to advance while organizations determine what that means for jobs, structures and ways of working. Executive support does not need to wait for those answers before preparing for what comes next.
Adaptability mattered during the last period of unprecedented workplace change. It will matter again. What adaptability requires is changing.
Continue the conversation
What will adaptability require from your role as AI becomes more capable?
If this article raises a conversation that others in your professional network should be part of, share it with your colleagues.