Will AI Replace Filipino Virtual Assistants?

How AI is affecting virtual assistants in 2025 and are VAs even going to be needed anymore? So in the next few minutes, I'm going to talk all through virtual assistants and AI and is AI replacing vas? Is it going to replace all of their jobs? What is going to happen with virtual assistants? Specifically from the Philippines, but generally across the board? Is this going to change everything? So I hired my first VA from the Philippines in 2005. I don't really like the word VA because that's not who I hire and that's not really who this video is. This video is about the whole spectrum of talent from like low end data entry people to high end programmers or Facebook ads people or creative people, designers, whatever it is, content writers. We're talking about all these people. These are not just virtual assistants. But that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to categorize them into virtual assistants because that's how we call them. I hate it. That's where our world is right now. So I hired my first VA in 2005. That guy still works for me today. Today. When I hired him initially, he knew almost nothing. Today is unbelievably talented, super great at managing who's doing what in our business and following up and finding problems and coming up with ideas. Really, really impressive. Can I replace him with AI right now? Absolutely not. There's not a chance that that could happen right now. However, let's go back and talk about the change that I've seen in virtual assistants over the years, kind of compared to AI. So this first person that I hired, when I hired him, he knew nothing. He was very, very basic. And the job he was doing at the time and AI could have done it, today's AI could have done it better than what he was doing, at least part of it. And that's really where I'm going to head with this. So what he was doing at the time was writing articles about our content and he was posting those articles in different places and he was adding links to them. And so could they have written the articles? Yes. Could it have added links and headlines and bylines? Yes, it could have done all that stuff. Could it post it in all the places he was and linked them together? Well, right now AI cannot do that, at least not as far as I understand it. In the future, will it be able to? Yes, probably. So is some change coming? Yes, that is definitely going to happen. Where it's going to replace some of the things that we currently do now. What Is AI capable of doing currently? Well, let me give you our experience and what we're trying to do and where we're currently getting with it, because I know some of you guys are like, oh, I'm not going to hire a virtual assistant because AI is going to take care of that really soon. So here's what I've done. I've been using Delphi AI to create an AI version of myself, a clone of myself. I have fed it hundreds or maybe thousands of pieces of content that I've created over the years. And Delphi specifically specializes in creating a clone of you through AI. So I fed it all of my content and then I ask it questions. And often I'll just take a question that I get in my email and copy it and paste it into Delphi AI and it always gives back really good responses. They're well thought out or they appear well thought out. Now, on this, on the other side of this, Julia, one of my ofs online Filipino specialist. She's not a virtual assistant. She's too talented, knowledgeable, specialized to be called a virtual assistant. Right. So Julia in the Philippines answers a lot of my email for me. And so I'm taking, I'm going to compare these two situations. What is AI doing and what is Julia doing? So the AI, when I take a question I get from a customer out of my email, put it in, it gives me an answer back. I read that answer about half the time, it's correct in giving the answer that it gives now in being correct, meaning it gave a similar answer to what I would have done. It doesn't necessarily word it how I want, how I would have worded it. It's the current AI from Delphi is very wordy and I always give faster answers than that. But maybe that's only because I'm conscious about my time and the AI is not conscious about time. And so maybe I can have it give a less wordy answer. I'm sure I could about 30% of the time. So that's half the time it gives a pretty good answer. About 30% of the time it's just regurgitating garbage from the Internet, which it's been trained on the Internet. And so when it doesn't have something specific that it can figure out from me, then it's just regurgitating garbage. And mostly it's just garbage. Like, it's the kind of stuff that you would read and be like, well, that sucks. I didn't know. That's not the answer I was looking for 20% of the time it's wrong. Like it's the opposite. It's giving the opposite advice from what I have fed it. And there have been. It's probably one out of five where I know that I have content about this. I know I have fed it this content, and it's still giving the opposite advice to the advice that I would give. So is AI there yet to replace my customer support people? No, it's not. At least not if I want to give valuable advice. If I just want to write good responses, yep, it could absolutely replace my customer support people and write good responses. It doesn't necessarily mean it would be valuable responses. Like it would give the opposite advice that we would give 20% of the time, which is a pretty high percentage. Now it's getting better. We are slowly correcting it now. This is a manual process for us right now. When it gives a bad answer, then we manually correct it, maybe with more content or maybe if I had 100,000 pieces of content, then it would be correct all the time, or 98% of the time or something like that. I don't have 100,000 pieces of content and most people don't. So if your customer support is always just standard, it's the same thing over and over again. It never varies, then. Yeah, and AI could probably do that as long as you have the support documentation for that. But if that's what your customer support people are doing, then you have a content problem and an education problem somewhere else where you should be educating people ahead of time on those things so that they're not getting the same questions over and over and over and over and over again. Now let's go to the other side of this and what my va, what Julia is doing and how her success rate is to me. So Julia got to a point where I told her to stop writing draft emails so that I could see them and review them and edit them and just send the emails that she's writing. I trust her content so much that I don't actually want to see what she's responding to people, because her responses are usually as good or better than my responses. And I would give her probably a 98% accuracy rate of all the emails that I've seen from her. I've seen one or two where it was like, okay, that was not correct, at least not according to my knowledge. But in probably half the emails that she writes, what she has written is better, more thorough, more correct, with more knowledge than what I would have written. So is AI replacing your va? Not right now, it is not. And in this situation of where you have knowledge, you've dispersed that knowledge to other humans. It is not ready to replace that knowledge. So then let's dive into content creation a little bit, because that's kind of what we're talking about in this situation, content creation. So can AI write really good content? Yes, it can. It can write you really good content. It can write you content that you can post online. It can. It can write good content. Now, let me tell you where we're headed with this, because I have two examples from today for this. So today I got back from one of my team members a piece of content that they're writing about. The ultimate guide to hiring virtual assistants in the Philippines. This is supposed to be like the best piece of content online. And he sent it to me, and I got partway through it, and it was. It was actually really, really great, like, in my voice and talking about things that he knows that I teach. Now, we've been through a number of revisions here. And then I got, like I said, about halfway through it, and I got to the AI content, and I could tell this was written by AI. Like, you didn't write this. And I know because it's using certain phrases over and over again. It's doing certain things that humans don't do. It's writing in a way that humans don't write. And yes, AI is getting better at it, but it's still definitely not there. And I just sent it back and said, hey, like, I know this was written with AI, and here's why. I know, fix it, change it. So he has used AI to help him write this thing. And how much of the first half of it was written with AI? I don't know. It was pretty good. I know that parts of it were in the past, and I caught it and was like, yeah, you can't write. Sorry, this isn't going to work for me. You got to change this. And he went back and changed it and did a really good job. But that's him, right? That's not it. That's him. That's a person doing the work to get it correctly. And what I'm getting at here is if you don't care about what you're putting out, if. If you don't care, then yes, AI will replace your virtual assistant in terms of creating content, if you care. It's not there yet. Now, let me give you another example of this. I got back today from. I don't even know who an employer using onlinejobs PH says to me, hey, I'm getting a lot of AI generated job applications. Like, that sucks. And she says, I'm ignoring them. Every single one of them that's AI generated. I ignore it. And yeah, that's the reality of where we're going. People are getting, people are going to get good. Some people are already getting good. People will get good at recognizing what is human and what's not human. And in the end, we crave, we need, we want human connection, not computer connection. Now what, what the AI that I've seen is really good at is, is pulling out a whole bunch of different sources of technical. And answering your question, like if, if I were to ask my AI what is the 13th month? It would give a really great answer to that. If I were to say, hey, I have a problem with my people. What should I do? It's giving bad answers. And what is the 13th month is something that, you know, like, it's nice to get an AI answer for you. It's nice to get an AI summary of it. It happens really quickly without you having to do any research. But what should I do is a human experience thing. And it does a really poor job. And that's where it, that, that's where it matters. Like what is the 13th month? Well, you know, okay, like this matters, but what should I do? It's a different story. And if you got an answer from Julia with what should I do? It would be really helpful. It would be valuable if you got an answer from my AI of what should I do? It would probably be sucky. Now, maybe AI is going to get better at this human connection. Maybe it will have feelings that, I mean, we generally, we always imagined maybe Anaya could think, and now it's kind of thinking. But the thought of it having feeling at some point, which is what you would get from me or Julia or from the guy rewriting the Ultimate Guide to Hiring. You're getting feeling and personal experience there where that's what we as humans want and that's not what we're getting out of an AI. It will mimic it, but you can feel a difference. So let's talk about a couple different other areas where we can use AI and what's going on with it. So number one, I want to talk about programming. My brother is deep into, into using AI tools and he's been building, he's been building test products, having the AI build it for him. And he says it's cut our time to building a minimum viable product from two months to two Days like, that's super awesome. I keep pushing my programming team to try and use AI tools in their, in their code writing and they keep coming back and saying this is not great. And that's as far as I'm going to go with it. I have tested it towards creating an outline for a software system and it did a really good job towards creating a database schema for a software system. And it did a really good initial job of it. And then I was able to look at it and be like, okay, well this and this and this are wrong, or this and this and this need to be changed. These things can be fixed. We can build on it here. Like, and the more I gave it, the more complicated the system got, the worse the design improved. Now is that going to change with AI? I don't know. But with my programmers using that, what they're doing right now to help them is getting an initial piece from it and then doing the actual work. So in that case it's saving them time. And I would go back to Julia using my clone, my Delphi AI clone, and it's saving her time. Like she can put something in. If it's good, then she can use it. If it's not good, then she can correct it, which is what I've been doing. My programmer is putting something in and it coming back with something and that's saving them. Maybe it would have taken them 20 minutes to write that code and it just wrote it in two minutes and now they have to go fix it for five minutes and they spent seven minutes instead of 20 minutes. Like that's pretty great. That's a pretty good time savings. Design work. So in design work it's kind of interesting. You can get some really great designs from, from an AI. Often again, it lacks the human. It lacks human. But if you can get something really great from it, that's great. And then if you, if it needs to be modified how you want it, then you get a human to modify it. Well, that makes your social media content creation, your design work that much faster. And someone, someone can, someone running that can do it more efficiently and create more and you can produce more now. And there's a pattern going on here in all of these things. It's that AI right now is being used as a tool to make people more efficient and more effective. It's not replacing people, I'm sure in some situations it's replacing people. In my business and in the tools that I'm seeing and in the way things are being used, we're not seeing replacing, we're seeing improving. Where my virtual assistants are better because of AI. They're able to serve more people better. They're able to produce more content better than they would without it. Now, you have to be careful on that because in the ultimate guide that I talked about, it produced content worse than I think he would have done had he just done it himself. And so he tried to get it to do it better for him. I think it produced. I think it made a worse product that he's having to go back and fix. So what do I see as the future of virtual assistants versus AI moving forward? Well, I see people getting better. I see people getting faster. I see people using AIs to do their jobs in a more efficient manner. Do I see it replacing people? Yes, in some situations I do. But in a lot of situations, I see people just getting better at their jobs by using it. People will get better at prompt writing. VAs will get better at using the tools that they're given. On the other side of it, humans will get better at recognizing this is generic garbage. This is spewed from the Internet. This isn't actually correct, but in a lot of cases, maybe it provides a faster solution than what was a previous solution. Now, in my case, that's what I'm doing. Julia answers my emails because she answers them faster than I would have done. And she does it as well as I would do it in almost all cases. Now, an AI would probably answer it faster than her, but it's less correct than her. So I could have an AI respond to all of my emails, but 50% of the time it would be right. And 50% of the time it would be, well, not necessarily wrong, but often it would be wrong. Just blatantly wrong. But Julia, AI is actually a really, really great combination of speed, knowledge, accessibility to information, and it's really creating a great user experience. It maintains the human while adding the speed of the AI. And we're seeing this across the board in content creation, in programming, in data entry, in video editing. It's speeding up video editing. It's not doing it all for you. Or if it is, it's not creating as good of a product. So moving forward, that's what I see. I see all of my VA's using AI to help them do their jobs more efficiently so that we can grow faster. Maybe, maybe we hire less because our people are capable of taking on more work, doing it more efficiently and faster. Maybe our content improves because it's coming up with ideas and writing outlines and then they're writing better content, more thorough content, because the AI is coming up with ideas that they didn't think about. In all of this, we're still maintaining the human element, the human piece. Where we want connection, we crave connection with humans. We need human connection. And while I can mimic that, it's not not the same feeling. So now, if you've thought about hiring a virtual assistant and you've been putting it off, where do you go to hire someone? Well, the best place is onlinejobs.ph. it is a giant database of virtual assistants who are saying, here are the skills that I have, here's the work that I'm willing to do. You hire them directly. There's no middleman markup, you don't have to pay salary markup, you don't have to pay an agency. You get to find the people on your own. You get to communicate directly with them. There's not someone in between you. You get access to a gigantic pool of talent, over 3 million profiles of talented Filipino workers. You can find basically any talent you're looking for. And you get the human piece of work and relationships where they can also use the technology piece of it to help them be more efficient and faster.