Can AI Replace My Virtual Assistant?

Welcome to Q and A Wednesday here on the $100 MBA show, where I answer your questions about building and growing your business. Today's question comes from Kim. And Kim asks, with all the AI tools out there, do I still need to hire a virtual assistant? This is a great question, Kim, and in short, my answer is yes. You still would need a virtual assistant or an executive assistant to take on your admin tasks. AI tools are incredible. I use them every single day. But AI is not a replacement for for human support. I'm gonna break down in today's episode based on my own 20 years of experience why this is true real quick. If these episodes help you in any way, hit subscribe. It helps us keep bringing you practical business insights three times a week for free. Thanks. AI is a powerful tool. But for the time being, up to this point, in this moment in time, when I'm recording this episode, you still need humans on your team. And I'm gonna explain why. I first want to acknowledge the power of AI. AI is so amazing. It's like magic, really. It can help you draft emails, social posts, documents. It could summarize meetings. It can generate ideas for you that you can bounce off the AI and then come up with your own ideas. You can even code tools like ChatGPT and Jasper and Descript and Canva. They all have AI built in now and they have automations that allow you to save hours of time. It's incredible. In a lot of ways, I believe that AI has leveled the playing field and solo entrepreneurs can really produce a high level of work, almost to the equivalent of big teams. But it can't do everything. Entrepreneurs think, if I have AI, if AI is doing X, Y, Z, why do I need to hire a human? That's like saying, I have power tools, so I don't need a builder. The tools are powerful, but someone still needs to use them, use these tools, use their judgment, and quality of judgment is incredibly important. And make sure that the work gets done consistently and properly. Right? You can't just point to the tools and say, build me a house. I actually know this firsthand because I use a lot of AI tools to build AI apps and tools. And you can't just tell the AI app, hey, build me X, Y, Z with a simple prompt. It doesn't really know what you want, right? It doesn't really know how to implement what you want. And that's why precise prompts, instructions is required. That requires a human with thought, with idea, with experience, with the knowledge of what to tell the tool in order for them to actually get the best result possible. So say for example, there was an AI to build a house, right? If I just said to the AI, build me a house, right, it might build a weird looking house where the bathroom is inside the kitchen and all that kind of stuff. And it doesn't really know exactly what you want, it's just going to guess what you want. So what you really need is a plan. You need to make decisions and you need to actually use these tools to get you the best results. And that requires human interaction. So let's get back to the VA idea. Having a virtual assistant, somebody to take off your admin work, right? Here's why VA is still essential in my opinion. Even with AI being used everywhere, right? You still need somebody that can apply context and judgment. AI is great at generating, but it's not great at knowing your priorities, your brand, your nuances. And a va, a person knows you, knows your tone, understands your goals, understands the totality of your brand and the end goal of your business. A human can actually judge if the AI scripted email is going to make the cut or if it needs editing or needs changing or further prompts are needed. The other reason why I still hire humans is because you need somebody who is focused on execution and follow through. AI can create, but it doesn't do, it actually doesn't do the work for you. A VA or an assistant make sure the tasks actually get published, get sent, get uploaded, get checked. They are responsible for the tasks. Execution is everything. This is a key difference. AI will never be responsible for anything, okay? In fact they have all these like clauses and terms like hey, you gotta check the work, make sure that I always can make a mistake. They have that in ChatGPT and everywhere else. You know, they check the response. But when you hire somebody, they can be responsible of the output. They could check everything and make sure that hey, this is up to standard, it's up to integrity, it's up to the law, right? And to your own standards of quality for your business. So you really need a person to own the responsibility of what you're trying to pull off. Another reason why I hire humans is that they're very good at managing honestly Chaos. AI doesn't triage your inbox or chase up late invoices or remind you about the podcast interview with a phone call somebody, a human person calling you up and say, hey, don't forget, in five minutes you have a pre interview for this podcast guest. A VA does, this person's got your back. I also Hire humans because relationships matter. Relationship management in your business is a big deal. Business runs on relationships. AI can't manage client introductions, sensitive situations, or they can't build rapport with another human. Right? People know it's AI. A lot of people, they can't stand when they get the AI bought in customer support, when they're trying to reach out to cancel the subscription or get a refund or whatever it might be. That human touch is so valuable in business that it's just not worth risking with. And AI. What else? Quality control, right? AI is fast, but it's not always accurate. It makes a ton of mistakes. VAs are very good at spotting mistakes, attention to detail and reaching out to your customers to make sure they make it right. Maybe this will change, maybe AI will get more accurate and get better at it. But right now I think that AI makes more mistakes than an actual human being. In short, AI creates leverage. But a human hire ensures leverage actually turns into results. Right? They take responsibility of the results. So listen, I'm not saying throw the baby out with a bathwater. I'm not saying just forget about AI. It's stupid. No, we want to use both. And here's how it looks. In my own business, we've built and sold a software company called Webinar Ninja. And how I've done it over the years with automations, with tools, with AI, with all kinds of stuff, right? But my VAs, my administrative assistants, these are the most valuable hires we make because they actually take off my plate the things that take the most time. For example, let's take something that we do every single week, which is our newsletter, right? We have a copywriter that writes our newsletters. But we could do a quick check in AI to test different subject lines for this newsletter. So we could upload the newsletter copy and say, hey, we want a bunch of subject lines that we can a b test inside of our, our email marketing software, ConvertKit. So this is a good use of AI with my VA working with the AI to get us a better result, right? And she will load up inside of ConvertKit and load up all the subject lines to see if things work. And we're using obviously the automations inside of ConvertKit and the scheduling and all that kind of stuff. So this is a great use of human interaction and AI interaction. Another use of AI I use personally is that I get a lot of people reporting to me and they give me the summary of what they've done this week, right? They give me their high level rapport. How's YouTube performing. How is the podcast performing? What about our ads? Our ads team come and tells me this is what we've done this week. And often these reports are quite detailed, several pages long. I can then just upload it to my favorite AI app and it gives me a quick summary that I could just read in five seconds to understand, okay, this is what's going well. This is what's not going so well. This is what we got to work on. And then I can then look at the report and in detail in the areas that I want to go deeper in. But the big reason why I still hire humans, especially for VA jobs, is that I don't want to be a bottleneck anymore. I don't want to be the person approving, tweaking, fixing, uploading. The VA is the person that does that. I get leverage on top of leverage. You get it. So I don't have to block anything. I'm not the person that's rubber stamping everything. They make decisions because they own the tasks. They own own the job and they make sure that, hey, I got this and I'm going to get you the result you're looking for. Now I'm going to share with you a way of looking at this, a exercise that you can do right now that I've learned from my coach, my mentor, Dan Martell. Years ago, Dan taught me about this concept of $10 tasks, $100 tasks, $1,000 tasks, and $10,000 tasks. A $10 task is something repetitive like scheduling, posting, formatting, replying to emails. A hundred dollars task is slightly higher, like customer support, response to a sales inquiry. Right? It's going to make money. And by the way, this ten dollars, a hundred dollars is like how much money I can make from this actual task, from this actual action. So I could probably make around $100 if I handle this conversation with this customer. But I still don't want to do it myself. It's I consider a $100 task because somebody else can do it. Then there's a thousand dollar task, like choosing a marketing strategy, right? This is usually a medium level decision. And then there's a $10,000 task. This is vision, creating a new product, closing a big deal, recording a podcast episode. These are things that actually move the needle big time. Now, AI can reduce the time you spend on $10 tasks and $100 tasks easily. But without a VA or a human assistant, you're still doing way too much. You're still doing way too much without them on your side, without them being on your team because yes, the AI can help you, but you're still rolling up your sleeves and doing the work. If you're in business right now and you are making money and you're transacting, maybe you're not making millions, but you are moving along. Your job is to move towards only doing thousand dollar and $10,000 tasks and eventually not doing thousand dollar tasks and just doing $10,000 tasks. And then the ultimate goal is not doing even the $10,000 task. Get high level employees, team members to take care of that for you too. So for me, really all I focus on is content. Being the person that teaches on the podcast. After I record right now, everything gets sent to my team and they take care of everything. And the publishing and all that kind of stuff. I don't do any of that admin task, the editing, all that stuff. The other thing I always focus on is product. Any kind of product we work on. Because those are the two things I think my input has value in increasing the value of my company and the reven we make everything else. Basically I should be outsourcing and that's what I do. I should be delegating to somebody else on my team or hiring for it. Now here's the good news. AI actually makes your assistant, your VA more valuable. A VA with AI skills is like a VA that is like a superhuman person, right? Is like a superhero in your business. They don't just do admin, they can now draft, create, edit with AI's help, right? And there's less room for error now because AI can correct typos and grammar mistakes, it can fix issues. Even if there's a little bug on your website, they can figure out what's wrong with it. AI can help you fix that for you. That means if you hire one great VA who uses AI, this is going to be as powerful of having two to three people on your team. And in my opinion, when it comes to hiring assistants, somebody who's doing a lot of admin work, pay above market rate, right? If you're hiring out of the Philippines, if you're hiring out of South America, whatever it might be Latin America, paying just 20 to 30% more than the average attracts some of the best people in that region. And it creates loyalty, it creates retention, it's well worth the investment. I rather pay one amazing VA than juggle three mediocre ones that are giving me headaches. So Kim, who asked today's question, do you still need a VA with all the AI tools out there? Absolutely. Because you're going to be able to leverage more with a human using AI. It empowers them for the time being. AI is a power tool. Okay? Your VA is the builder and you, the founder, are the architect. You're the person that tells the actual builder, this is the blueprint. This is what I want you to build. If you want to scale, then follow my advice because it's going to really help you build on solid foundation. Kim, thank you so much for the great question. And if you have a question you want to ask, don't forget you could submit it over at 100mba.netq and we'll answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. And if you want more insights from me, you should join our three Things newsletter. It's absolutely free. Every week we send out a newsletter that gives you three things. One, something to think about to improve your mindset. Number two, something to do so you're actually taking action, small little activities. And number three, something to learn so you're skilling up. It takes about 5 minutes to consume every week and over 800 people have signed up just last week. So go ahead to 100- MBA-NET newsletter to sign up. When you make a hire on your team, you basically multiply the power of your company and what you can do. And I believe one of the best hires you can make in your company are administrators, VAs, assistants because they take away a lot of the stuff you shouldn't be working on low value tasks and allow you to have a bit more time to think creatively, allows you to recruit better people, allows you to be a leader. Okay. And the cost versus reward on this transaction is immense and it allows you then to focus on bringing in more revenue to your company. It's the floor shifting right now and a lot of people are worried. Hey, what does that mean? For me? The first thing I would recommend is when you hire somebody, make sure that they're willing to be trained and train them on how to use AI. Right? There's plenty of courses out there. There's plenty of stuff that you can find online and allow them to kind of just get a good understanding of how to use the basic tools like ChatGPT to be able to leverage their own skills in doing a better job for you. Thanks so much and I'll check you in the next episode.