The EA-fication of Everything

A personal pet peeve of mine is when a friend or peer punts me to their executive assistant to handle scheduling when we’re already mid-conversation and they could have just glanced at their calendar and scheduled it right there.

If this is a make-or-break client and the deal of the year? Fine. Great. I’m being paid to smile. But otherwise, it just becomes…oh, okay, well, here’s my EA to talk to your EA. One quick “how’s this upcoming Thursday” becomes an escalating email arms race with 20 back and forth volleys scheduling a meeting months into the future when the thing isn’t even going to be relevant anymore. What’s the point of us maintaining a relationship if it’s just going to be two assistants in contact with each other? It’s effectively, at scale, my assistant sending you an obligatory happy birthday message and yours sending one back to me every year as well. Productivity goal: met. Network: somehow getting more disconnected than ever.

The first wave of AI drafting bots is starting to feel exactly like this. In the beginning it feels like an enormous efficiency boost, because it genuinely is one. If the early adopters implemented their systems correctly, they are pulling real productivity gains today.

But think about what happens when your virtual assistant starts corresponding with mine and I mean virtual in the digital way, like my virtual virtual assistant, not the remote one working in the Philippines.

In the early days, you gain productivity while everyone thinks they’re corresponding with the real you and writes a genuine message back. But then when everyone’s doing it, it rapidly becomes pointless. Your bot writes a legitimate, substantive email; my bot writes a legitimate, substantive reply; and now there’s a whole conversation neither of us actually had.

At that point, we either start passing out secret email addresses that not even our virtual virtual assistants know about, while we both pinky swear not to use our AIs to auto-reply, or we just ignore email altogether. If junk email didn’t kill email, this definitely will. Clients already flood my iMessage because they abandoned the email spam wasteland, and I’m pretty sure if the bots take over iMessage, I might have to resort back to sending carrier pigeons.

My best guess is that these email bots are going to start forcing the ultimate Turing test. The bots get us on the calendar together in person, but once logistics are handled, the entire conversation happens face to face. No back and forth to get pre-aligned, no setting up the last mile of the deal to be handled in person. The in-person meeting becomes more important than ever, because it’s the only meeting where you know you are talking to the actual person. The bots can already pass the Turing test, so the only way to know for sure is the in-person meeting. (Unless you send your Westworld robot…)

Nobody wants to read wave after wave of AI-generated content, even when it legitimately moves the discussion forward. If you wanted to do that, you’d just turn on your own chatbot and have a one-way conversation on demand. So everything that matters gets pushed to the room. No AI crutch. No wrapper, no editor, no draft.

Turns out the most futuristic thing AI might do is send us all back into in-person meetings.