AI agents mean everyone can have their own PA: David Richards

Then I started Yorkshire AI Labs, and there was no Jerilyn. I was late. I missed meetings. Whatever can go wrong with a diary, I managed it.

So I built her a twin. ‘Agentic’ is the industry’s word for it. All it means is software that does things rather than answering questions.

Most people know AI as a chatbot, good for a limerick about Sheffield. Jerilyn-bot has the keys. Every morning she goes through my email and texts and calendars and hands me a list of what matters and what to do about it.

Things go in the diary without my touching them. When I am running late she tells me to set off now, and once I am in the car she has a word with the car, which takes over the nagging.

Before every meeting I get a briefing with the points I need to know, and for the India trip I wrote about last month she produced 30 pages of it and a travel pack with every detail.

Strictly, she is several. There is a Jerilyn for the to-do list and a Jerilyn for travel, among others, and they talk to each other and share the work as an office would. Another can trade shares, and one lunchtime wrote up an options trade and then spent my lunch arguing that the broker would not let her place it until I upgraded my options permissions, so would I please do that and let her finish the job. I did. Only I could change those permissions. Of all of it, that is the part I find most reassuring.

What surprised me was what was hard, and it was not the intelligence, which the big models have plenty of and their makers rent out by the month.

The hard part was plumbing, giving her the inbox, the calendars, the broker, the car, and the standing orders, written in plain English, that tell her what I think is important and what I do not.

Writing down what Jerilyn knew took longer than anything technical. Gartner reckons more than four in ten agentic AI projects will be scrapped by the end of 2027, and has a name for vendors who stick the word on an old chatbot: agent washing. I believe it. Mine works because I knew what I was copying. I had watched a very good one for twenty years.

A Jerilyn used to be something only a chief executive got. Robert Half’s latest salary guide puts the midpoint starting salary for an executive assistant in Greater London at £62,500 a year before the desk and the pension, which is why the founder of a three-person start-up books her own flights and misses her own meetings. Now much of the routine work comes with a subscription costing less a month than a day of that.

She depends, I should admit, on an American company. Regular readers know my views on that.

Nothing will replace the real Jerilyn. Her twin still has to be told what matters, and the original knew before I did. But I am on time again. If you want an answer from me, you know where to go.

Before I filed this I asked her what she made of it. Good, she said, "not just because I come out of it well”.

David Richards MBE is managing partner of Yorkshire AI Labs