Artificial Intelligence is amazing — but it’s at its best when combined with human oversight, creativity, and care.
On its own, AI still makes mistakes (aka hallucinations). And unfortunately, the people using AI can get it wrong too. For example:
- Responding to tragedy using an AI response when real human empathy is more appropriate.
- Trusting that AI outputs are true and using fictitious research in a legal setting.
- Relying on an AI “journalist” to generate content, unaware that errors and significant plagiarism would be the end result.
These stories don’t diminish the potential and power of using AI, but they do serve as a cautionary reminder that AI is a tool that must be used correctly.
AI is here to stay. 56% of surveyed businesses are using AI to help with customer service and 40% are using it for producing content. Our own research shows that AI use by executive assistants is on the rise.
When we asked our Boldly LinkedIn community how they were using AI, here’s what they said:
The high-trust nature of the EA position means that AI oversight needs to be thoughtful and thorough. That’s why we’ve created this checklist for executive assistants on what to do before hitting publish or send when using AI-generated content.
Before You Start Using AI
Before we get to the checklist, we want to save you some time upfront.
You’ll never get good results using AI if you don’t have a solid foundation before starting. There are AI skills every executive assistant needs before diving in.
- Understand the kind of AI tool you’re using. Different tools use different language models. Different tools are intended for different kinds of outputs. An EA needs to learn AI tools before using them.
- Know how to use AI prompts correctly for the most accurate results.
- Know whether the task would benefit from a productivity boost using AI, or if AI will just be added work and make you less efficient.
If all of these bases are covered and AI use is a go, our checklist will be the most beneficial to you.
Read more: 50 Powerful ChatGPT Prompts For Executive Assistants To Boost Productivity
Pre-Checklist: What To Double Check With AI-Generated Content
It can be helpful to think of AI outputs similarly to an intern’s first draft — you’ll want to read it carefully, double-check important facts, and make sure it represents you and/or your client accurately.
Before you publish or send out any AI-generated content, go through this checklist carefully:
- Make sure the content reflects the proper message and tone. AI writing can sound like it was written with AI — it’s helpful to add your own human touch.
- Verify that all facts or statements are accurate and true. If an AI tool provides a statistic, verify and cite the source.
- Make sure grammar, spelling, and other formatting concerns are correct.
- Make sure the content fits the style guide you or your client uses, including acronyms, jargon, and other references.
- Verify that no content has been plagiarized.
- Decide whether or not you need to add additional content of your own.
- If applicable, verify that scheduling or calendar events created by AI have the correct details and don’t conflict with other items on the calendar.
- Make sure the final product accurately reflects your executive’s personality or preferences.
Let’s take a deeper look at a few of these.
Verify that the content is accurate and true.
The best way to verify that facts and statements are true, especially if you are asked to back it up later, is to have your source material handy.
Not every AI provides the source for their content. Just because AI returned something doesn’t mean it has a good source, or that it didn’t pull random things out of many sources to create something completely made-up.
Some AI tools will provide sources — even if they do, check these sources for yourself to see how accurately the AI tool you’re using reflects that material.
This verification of accuracy also ties to warding off plagiarism.
Many AI tools rely so heavily on source material that they lift copy directly from the source. Being able to visit the source is necessary to spot plagiarized content. You may also use plagiarism checkers, but the benefit of manually checking it out yourself is you learn more about how your AI tool functions and what to expect in the future.
Personalize the generated content.
You will likely need to edit the AI-generated content. As we suggested before, think of AI-generated content as a rough draft.
Some AI tools allow you to adjust the tone of your content from formal to more creative, but it cannot perfectly mimic the personality and voice of your executive as well as you can.
You’ll likely have to adjust its style and tone. You’ll have to adjust how things are referenced to fit organizational rules. You may have to humanize it or make it a better fit for how it will be used.
Even more importantly, you need to avoid “content-lite” problems that sometimes come with AI-generated content. Depending on the AI tool used, you might get a return of lots of words, but it might not actually say much or make clear sense.
Look for scheduling conflicts.
Depending on the AI tool you use and the other tools you use for calendar management, there could be some technical hiccups. They might not talk to each other perfectly, leaving the AI unaware of things on the calendar that it can’t read or access.
Or your executive may not have a meeting or time block on their calendar when they should — for example, a personal or family event that you know about as their EA, but the AI won’t.
Calendar management is a great use of AI, but you still have to double-check:
- Times and time zones for all meeting attendees
- Buffer zones around meetings and events
- Meeting and event details
- Travel times and preferences
Being skilled at creating great AI prompts, or setting up the AI tool as completely as possible to account for your executive’s preferences, will help you out when it comes to scheduling with AI.
Post-Publish Checklist For AI-Generated Content
The pre-publish checklist is the most important to get right, but if you’re looking to tweak and improve how you use AI, you might consider a post-publish checklist.
- Monitor feedback. Did your AI copy land well? Did the schedule work out better than if you’d done it yourself? Did you need a better prompt?
- Track whether AI made you more productive and effective or not. Determine how you could improve how you use AI to make it more useful or if there are some tasks better left to how you traditionally have done them.
- Pay attention to new AI developments. They seem to come out just about every week and what wasn’t good enough to use last week might have become a more powerful tool today.
A good rule of thumb with AI is that more work upfront is better in the long run.
Better input, improved prompts, detailed preference setup, and continuous education on AI developments—all will make AI-generated content more useful in the long run.
AI is powerful, but it is still only a tool.
It does not replace a high-quality executive assistant. Pitting the two against each other, AI vs. EA, reveals the shortcomings of AI. That doesn’t negate the power of the tool, but only reminds us of the importance of knowing how to use it correctly and recognize when correction is needed.
AI is here to stay, and as an executive assistant, this is good news.
