Executive Assistants Tripled Their AI Use in Two Years. Confidence Didn't Keep Up.

For years the executive assistant's calendar was the one part of the job everyone assumed software would take over first. It hasn't. The American Society of Administrative Professionals (ASAP) surveyed more than 5,500 people for its 2026 State of the Administrative Profession report. It found that assistants have taken up AI faster than almost any group of workers, but the confidence to build it into how the work actually gets done has lagged far behind.

AI Use Nearly Tripled in Two Years

ASAP's 2026 report draws on 5,536 respondents. Of those, 91% are administrative professionals, 5% are executives and 4% are HR leaders. The headline number is how fast AI adoption moved: 76.9% of administrative professionals now use AI in their daily work, up from 53.1% in 2025 and just 26.0% in 2024.

The tools are mostly general-purpose. ChatGPT leads at 85.5% of AI users, followed by Microsoft Copilot (49.6%), Grammarly (40.0%) and Google Gemini (15.4%). Those are writing and question-answering tools, and that's a clue to where the gap is.

Using AI Isn't the Same as Building It In

ASAP describes three levels of adoption, and the numbers fall at each one:

• 76.9% use AI tools.
• 59.7% feel confident teaching AI tools to someone else.
• 47.2% feel confident integrating AI into their workflows.

In other words, most assistants have used AI to draft an email or summarize a document, but fewer than half feel ready to make it part of the repeat, many-step work that fills their day. Scheduling is the clearest example of that kind of work. It means juggling time zones and an executive's preferences, protecting focus blocks, rescheduling when a meeting moves, and following up with external attendees. You don't solve it with one prompt to a chatbot. It's a process that runs all day.

ASAP's own framing makes the point. It describes the entry "Assisting" stage of the career as "focused on scheduling, document organization, and foundational tasks." Two-thirds of the survey's respondents (66.9%) identify at that stage.

The Strategic Work Is Waiting

The rest of the report explains why that matters. Assistants are highly experienced: 71% have 10 or more years in the role and 73.5% hold a college degree. Yet nearly 40% report no strategic, "Partnering" or "Leading" stage responsibilities at all. ASAP calls it "a role design problem, not a gap in skill."

Executives say they want more. They rank data visualization, risk mitigation and corporate governance as the most important capabilities for administrative professionals. The gaps are wide:

• 60.8% of executives call data visualization the top capability, but only 25.4% of assistants report proficiency.
• 63.8% rank risk mitigation as a high priority, against 39.4% of assistants who report proficiency.

Moving up pays off. ASAP puts the average salary at $67,284 for Assisting-stage professionals and $81,611 for the Partnering stage, a 21% increase. Meanwhile the share who feel valued fell from 67.8% to 62.2% in a single year, even as AI use surged.

Where AI Scheduling Actually Fits

Put those findings together and you get a fairly specific picture. Assistants are willing to use AI and are already using it. Executives want them doing more strategic work. The thing in between is a large amount of coordination work, much of it on the calendar, that general-purpose chat tools don't take off their plate.

That's where scheduling tools that work directly on the calendar earn their place. They find times across attendees and time zones, apply an executive's preferences, protect focus time, and handle the reschedule-and-follow-up loop without a human driving each step. The assistant still owns the calendar, and still makes the judgment calls about whose meeting matters more, which conflict to break, and when to say no. What changes is how many of their hours go into the mechanics.

More than half of assistants (53.8%) say they want to develop at least one AI skill in 2026. Making that skill "running the calendar with an AI scheduler" rather than "writing better prompts" may be the quickest way from the Assisting stage to the strategic work executives say they want.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many administrative professionals use AI today? According to ASAP's 2026 State of the Administrative Profession report, 76.9% use AI in their daily work, up from 26.0% in 2024.

If adoption is so high, what's the problem? Confidence lags well behind use. Only 47.2% feel confident integrating AI into their workflows, compared with 76.9% who use AI tools at all.

Is scheduling still a big part of the assistant role? Yes. ASAP describes the entry "Assisting" career stage as focused on scheduling, document organization and foundational tasks, and 66.9% of respondents identify at that stage.

What do executives want assistants spending time on instead? Executives rank data visualization, risk mitigation and corporate governance as top capabilities. Each shows a gap of 17 to 35 percentage points between what executives prioritize and what assistants report proficiency in.

Source: American Society of Administrative Professionals, "The 2026 State of the Administrative Profession: Key Findings & Insights" (https://www.asaporg.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ASAP-State-of-the-Profession-2026.pdf).