Picture the Monday huddle.
Eight o'clock, everyone standing around with a coffee, the same list of things that need chasing. You've been reading about AI for a few weeks and you decide to mention it. Just in passing. You say you're looking at an assistant to help with the admin side of the business.
Watch the room for about two seconds.
Nobody argues. A couple of people nod and someone checks their phone. And everyone in that circle quietly works out whether that sentence has their name in it.
I think those two seconds are why a lot of good owners wait. They know exactly what they'd be walking into. Some of the people on their team have been there since the business was small enough to fit in one room. They know each other's kids and which days are hard. You don't risk that to save a few hours, and you shouldn't.
So the hesitation says something good about you. It means you take your people seriously. The trouble is that a team left to guess will fill the silence with the worst version.
Here's what I'd want you to be able to say to them, and mean.
Think about what your people actually dislike about their week. Rarely the clients, and rarely the craft. It's the other part. Chasing the same payment for the fourth time, or answering a question somebody answered on Tuesday and again on Thursday. And then the small sting when something falls through the gap between two departments and lands on one person with the client already annoyed.
That is the work a good assistant takes first. It also happens to be work nobody has ever put on a wall as their proudest achievement.
The part people miss is who stays in charge. When it's set up properly, the person who knows your spreadsheet best becomes the person who checks the assistant's work. For the first couple of weeks it runs beside the process you already trust, and nothing changes until their numbers say it can. Their experience is what makes it safe.
If it catches something, the credit goes to the team. If it misses something, that comes to you, privately, and never into a message that names a person. A system that embarrasses people gets quietly sidelined, and it should.
I can't promise how it plays out in every business, and I'd be wary of anyone who does. What I can say is that it takes pieces of jobs, not whole jobs. Your senior consultant's phone call to a nervous agent stays with your senior consultant. The assistant gets the facts in front of them before the call and writes up the notes afterwards.
There's a relief in it for both sides of the door, too. Right now somebody is walking up to you every twenty minutes with a quick one. Can we give this agent the old rate. Does that lodge still do the free night. Most of those questions already have an answer that lives in somebody's head. An assistant that knows the answer means they stop queuing and you stop being the place everything has to pass through.
You get a quieter day. They get to make the call themselves.
So before you buy anything, ask them. Not in a meeting, more over a coffee. What would you hand off first, if you could?
The answers will be better than any audit I could run. The people who stay late finishing the thing nobody noticed was missing will tell you exactly what they'd give away. A lot of them have been waiting years to be asked.
What do you think yours would say?