Jennifer Maffei is struggling to keep up with messages from workers who need her help after being “downsized, right-sized, restructured”.
The recruiter, who specialises in placing administrative staff, says a growing number have been cut adrift as companies invest in AI. “It’s a mess,” she says. “They’re all from the big companies that have been ... anticipating that AI is going to be able to do x, y, z for them. In some cases, it will.”
Maffei is witnessing a bigger trend. Clerical and administrative workers – from medical transcriptionists to executive assistants to receptionists – make up the brunt of a group of about six million US workers most exposed to AI-driven displacement and least equipped to navigate it, according to think tank Brookings.
Older with narrower skill sets and limited savings, they both do work that is easily automated and have few alternative options if it is. More than 85 per cent of these workers are women, says Brookings.
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Exposure of these stereotypically female professions signals a broader threat. Many professions “with the least adaptability [to AI] are heavily female dominated”, says Laura Ullrich, research director at job site Indeed. She fears an erosion of women-dominated roles could increase gender inequality as progress is already reversing. “We’re already seeing some warning signs,” she says.
As employers invest in AI and cull staff, back-office roles have been particularly affected. In the past year, shipping group Maersk announced it would slash 1,000 administrative roles globally, and broader lay-offs at companies from Procter & Gamble to Amazon have hit corporate support roles. Administrative help is available from tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, which boasts the ability to schedule, take notes and prepare documents, while specialised tools such as Lindy promise comprehensive support at a lower cost than human assistants.
Kelly Norton is among the workers seeing demand for her profession wane. A few years ago, she earned a six-figure salary as an executive assistant at a Las Vegas office; now, after months of applying to 10 roles a day, she feels she has already applied for every position she is qualified for, though most offer salaries that feel “like an insult” at half what she once earned.
Norton is proud of her AI skills: she started a 500-member online community where executive assistants can learn about how to boost their skills so they can “stay ahead in a rapidly changing workforce”. Claude aids her job search, and she has used it to create tools for her bosses, too. “I have a bot that pulls out approvals, requests, things [my boss] needs to reply to urgently,” she says. “It’s crazy what it can do.”
Indeed data indicates that job postings for administrative assistance roles, which women tend to dominate, have fallen to 5.4 per cent lower than pre-Covid levels. Meanwhile, the US gender pay gap has also expanded in the past two years after decades of progress, and in 2025, labour force participation among men increased by 572,000, compared with 184,000 among women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
An International Labour Organisation study last year found roles at highest risk of “AI-driven task automation” accounted for 9.6 per cent of female employment in higher-income countries, nearly triple men’s share, and warned some would have “limited opportunities to adapt” without training or role redesign. Women are also less likely to receive AI training or experiment with the tools independently. A Harvard study last year found women were using AI at a 25 per cent lower rate than men, findings reinforced by a Financial Times survey on AI at work that warned AI’s benefits would be unequally distributed across gender and earning categories.
Jeff Strohl, director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, says workers protected from automation have historically occupied roles that demand a mix of skills and consist of less routine activities. “Occupations are made up of a portfolio of tasks, and when some of those tasks are vulnerable to AI, there’s a certain resilience that comes about by being able to do more than one thing.”
Clerical workers, on the other hand, are too often perceived as “day-to-day paper pushers”, says Kylie Rodriguez who started out as an executive assistant and now provides chief-of-staff services to various financial firms. While senior assistants co-ordinate complex tasks, junior EAs often focus on “supporting someone else” and find it “takes a lot of courage and effort” to carve out careers. “As companies have switched over to digital programmes and software like Calendly or Gemini that can schedule for them ... I do think it’s going to take over the lower-level admin assistant role eventually.”
Allison Elias, assistant professor at Darden School of Business, says much of this is down to history: through the 1950s women were expected to leave the workforce after marriage so were given limited administrative work, freeing men up for complex tasks and career paths. “If you started at a clerical job, you’d never really cross over to the managerial ladder,” she says. Today, clerical workers are still less likely to get support to develop new skills, and their pay also tends to be low: median 2024 pay in the US for receptionists was $37,230 (about €31,600), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The lack of a safety net “does put these workers more at risk because they probably have fewer options for moving into other work”, says Elias. “It’s going to need some corporate and HR solutions to supply training and development to move people into different jobs.”
The outlook for clerical workers contrasts with professions such as software developers and financial analysts, who are equally exposed to AI but more likely to “benefit from strong pay, financial buffers, diverse skills and deep professional networks” that make it easier to navigate job loss, the Brookings report found. They are also more likely to be male.
Yet some women in clerical roles remain optimistic about their jobs. At AES, which provides human executive assistants on a “virtual” online basis, the CEO’s assistant Linnae Dosumu-Johnson says administrative work requires a blend of skills such as project management, event planning and communication, including highly sensitive tasks for top-tier professionals.
“You can’t replace certain humans with AI,” she says. “High-profile people with thousands and thousands of dollars coming in and out every day ... are not going to accept anything other than perfection.” Whereas AI can help with repetitive tasks such as note-taking, “it can’t understand the nuances of what should happen next. And if there’s a mistake, you can’t depend on AI to fix it ... the tool is only as good as the operator.”
Still, when Maffei speaks to clients she now finds she has to dispense “tough love”, explaining that despite long careers they are now considered “under-skilled”. She advises them to make “a multi-stage leap” to develop new skills and broaden their professional pathways.
Some clients have had success crossing into project management or human resources. Others are starting at the bottom of industries they were cut from, hoping familiarity will help them work their way up, such as former legal assistants returning as paralegals.
Maffei’s advice, whatever path they choose? “Focus on things that need a human.” -Copyright Financial Times
