The AI Admin Debt Manifesto

In 2023, we were promised lighter days. Powerful new tools were coming. Smarter systems would take the slow, repetitive parts of our jobs off our hands, and whole categories of work would disappear. What was left would be the work only we could do. Three years in, here is where that promise actually left us.

We’ve used the free version of ChatGPT. We’ve bought the paid tools and the competing models. And every tool arrived carrying its own work: learn to prompt it, check its output for hallucinations, rebuild the context it lost, reformat what it gave back. Again, and then again.

The tools got faster. The work did not get smaller. It just changed shape.

We call this AI Admin Debt. It is the work the tools themselves create, work that did not exist a few years ago, and it grows with every tool you add. It is the prompt you rewrite a dozen times before it finally lands. It is the workflow you have to build and then keep running on your own. It is the output sitting in an unfinished chat, almost right, waiting for someone to finish it.

We might feel more productive, but are we actually producing more? Or are we just busier?

Because no one has named AI Admin Debt, we absorbed it without question. So we sit refining prompts, editing drafts that caught the structure but missed the tone, polishing roadmaps that never leave the tool they were built in, all while researching which tools we should be using and how the latest model should change our automations.

AI tells us we can be our own designer, our own coder, our own content strategist. But is that the job of an executive? Somewhere in the rush to adopt the tools, we took on every role that came with them. Now we have six tabs or tools open, each doing work, each requiring constant monitoring. We no longer focus on a single task, because we are trying to do everything, everywhere.

If any of this sounds familiar, you are carrying AI Admin Debt. And you do not have to keep paying it down alone. There is someone who understands how you think and how your tools work, who makes you faster at what matters and takes the rest off your plate.

That person is your executive assistant.

As executives, we would never spend six hours setting up a workflow in our CRM, we would never spend a whole day learning new software, we would never be the ones building the roadmap to begin with. These are the crucial, but time-consuming, tasks that we have always trusted to our EA. That hasn’t changed with AI. Our EA is still our best, most powerful tool: the key to unlocking our time, our focus, our full potential.