AI Assistants: What’s New and What’s Next

I have to admit—sometimes I find myself glancing at my phone or smart speaker and wondering, are you listening right now? It’s an oddly unsettling feeling. One minute you’re chatting with a friend about booking a trip to Denver, and the next, an ad for flights to Denver pops up on your screen. Coincidence? Maybe. […]

It’s a question I’ve heard whispered in hallways, asked nervously over coffee, and debated heatedly in executive meetings: Can AI really replace personal secretaries? At first glance, the idea feels almost absurd. Secretaries—or executive assistants, as many prefer to be called—are not just schedulers. They’re confidants, organizers, protectors of time, and often the quiet glue

The first time I saw a colleague casually ask a chatbot to draft an email that would’ve taken me twenty minutes, I felt two things at once: envy and unease. Envy because, wow, that was fast. Unease because if a machine could handle this so easily, what did that mean for people like me? This

Do you remember Clippy? That wide-eyed, bendy paperclip that would pop up in Microsoft Word and cheerfully (sometimes annoyingly) ask, “It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like some help?” For many of us, Clippy was the first brush with what we’d later call an AI assistant. Back then, it was quirky, rudimentary,