The EA role isn’t quietly evolving. It’s being reshaped right now.
Over the last eight months, something has shifted in my work.
For most of my career as a trainer and educator, around eighty percent of the executive assistants I worked with funded their own development. They invested personally because organisations hadn’t yet fully recognised the breadth of value the role could deliver.
That has flipped.
More EAs than ever are now having their development funded by their employer. At the same time, more executives than I’ve ever seen are reaching out in genuine curiosity to ask a different question.
Not how to get more output.
Not how to move faster.
But what excellent support actually looks like today.
That combination tells me something important.
We’re not in a slow, incremental evolution of the EA role.
We’re at a decision point.
This year feels different to every other time we’ve heard that the EA role is changing.
AI is now part of the everyday work ecosystem. And that alone changes expectations. It makes it logical, not optional, for executives to rely more heavily on human judgement and context. Those are things AI cannot carry.
At the same time, organisations are under pressure to consolidate, improve productivity, and do more with fewer layers.
We’re in what I’d describe as the messy middle.
Some EAs are deeply curious about how to expand the edges of their role now that value looks different. They’re thinking about influence, judgement, and contribution in new ways.
Others aren’t there yet. And that’s okay.
But this moment won’t pause while everyone catches up.
When I talk about a crossroads, I’m not talking about ambition or worth.
I’m talking about two very different paths that are emerging.
One path is to remain operating exactly as the role has been defined for decades. Working strictly to existing position descriptions. Staying within familiar ways of working because they feel safe and known.
In the context of consolidation and productivity pressure, that path is vulnerable. It’s more likely to be swept up in expanding ratios, diluted scope, and assumptions about what the role is and isn’t.
The other path is curiosity.
It’s executive assistants who are intentional and visionary about what their role and their career could be. People who are thinking like futurists. Who are asking how value is created now, not how it was created ten years ago.
Not everyone wants that path. And that’s important to say clearly.
But these two paths lead to very different outcomes.
Here’s where many organisations are getting it wrong.
They still underestimate the breadth of capability already sitting inside EA roles. They continue to frame the work as support or administration, and then wonder why they’re under-leveraging talent.
What’s missed in that framing is judgement.
Context.
Trust.
Influence.
As pace accelerates, when support models don’t evolve alongside it, organisations quietly open themselves up to risk. Decision quality suffers. Cognitive load increases. Pressure builds earlier and stays longer.
Ironically, the organisations most exposed are often the ones who believe they’re being efficient.
On the EA side, I see something else.
I meet extraordinarily capable professionals every day. People who are working hard to upskill, to share knowledge, to stretch themselves.
But there’s no clear template right now.
This is the messy middle. It’s being built in real time.
And alongside that, there’s a re-education process that needs to happen with executives in parallel. That’s not always easy in a profession that has historically had to fight for respect.
That uncertainty often shows up before it becomes language. It lives in calendars that feel heavier. In hesitation around speaking up. In second-guessing the value of work that is actually deeply impactful.
Executives today don’t just need help aligning time to priorities.
They need people close to them who can speed up the right work and slow down rooms when pressure distorts judgement. People who can ease cognitive load before it becomes visible stress.
That need is real. But it’s rarely articulated well.
EAs often miss the signal not because they lack capability, but because they haven’t been taught what questions to ask or how to name the value they’re already creating.
This moment is different because we’re still in experimentation.
Roles, expectations, and workflows are being recalibrated, but they’re not yet finalised or formalised. That makes this a window of opportunity.
This is the time for EAs to be part of the conversation, rather than having decisions made about them and then being asked to adapt.
Waiting for everything to settle means arriving too late.
Leaning into this moment takes more courage than ever.
It requires EAs to speak about their impact and value in clear, executive language, sometimes before there’s neat proof or precedent.
It takes influence. It takes credibility. And it takes a very clear sense of how you want to be perceived as the role itself is being reshaped.
That’s not easy work. But it’s the work that determines whether roles are designed intentionally or inherited by default.
This is the most exciting moment for executive assistants I’ve seen in my entire career.
It’s uncertain. It’s uncomfortable. And it’s full of possibility.
So I’ll leave you with a few reflections.
Where is the way you’ve always done things no longer fit for purpose?
What changed last year?
And the year before that?
What might that tell you about what’s coming next?
And what’s one stretch you could make in how you’re showing up, so you’re positioned on the right side of this shift rather than watching it happen around you?
If this episode resonated, share it with a colleague who you think would be interested in hearing it. Especially someone who’s thinking deeply about where the role is heading or who’s sitting in that messy middle trying to make sense of the change.
This conversation isn’t theoretical for me.
This is a keynote topic I’ve been speaking on regularly, and it’s one I’m deeply passionate about. I find it genuinely fascinating. In fact, there are moments where it almost makes me want to come out of EA retirement just to see what could be built now, given how much the landscape has changed.
I’ve also been having this conversation with executive teams, exploring what excellent support looks like today and what becomes possible when judgement and context are truly valued.
If you’re interested in having me speak on this at an event, a conference, or as an expanded in-house training session, you’re very welcome to get in touch.
This moment matters. And it’s one I care deeply about helping people navigate well.
Thanks for listening.
