When the office gets overloaded, the usual answer is to hire. Write a posting, wait for applications, interview, train, and hope the new person stays longer than the last one.
Before you do that, it's worth an hour to look at the posting itself, duty by duty, and ask which parts are repeatable work with clear right answers. In my experience, that's a bigger share than most owners expect. Here's the exercise on a typical posting.
A typical posting
Here's a composite of the office administrator postings I see from Calgary-area businesses every week:
- Answer phones and respond to email inquiries
- Schedule appointments and manage the calendar
- Process supplier invoices and enter them into the accounting system
- Prepare customer invoices and follow up on overdue accounts
- Maintain customer and supplier records
- Prepare weekly and monthly reports for management
- Order office and job supplies
- Draft letters, notices and routine correspondence
- Greet visitors and manage the front office
- Support the owner with ad hoc tasks
Ten duties. Let's go through them.
What AI can handle well
Phones and email inquiries. Routine questions about hours, availability, prices, bookings and directions can be answered by an AI assistant from your own information, by phone or email, around the clock. Anything unusual hands off to a person. I wrote about how this works in What an AI phone receptionist does with a missed call.
Scheduling. Booking, confirming and reminding are rule-based. An agent connected to your calendar can do it without the back-and-forth emails.
Supplier invoices. Reading invoices and preparing them for the accounting system is one of the strongest uses of AI, as long as there's a check. I use three independent reads that must agree, with disagreements going to a person. Details in Why we read every invoice three times.
Customer invoices and reminders. Drafting invoices from completed work and sending polite reminders at set intervals is mechanical once the rules are written.
Records. Keeping customer and supplier lists clean, catching duplicates, filling gaps from emails and invoices.
Reports. Pulling the numbers, comparing against last month and drafting a plain summary of what changed. This is the kind of work I did by hand for large companies for a decade, and it's now mostly automated.
Correspondence. First drafts of letters, notices and routine emails, in your tone, from your templates.
That's seven of the ten duties, though in each case a person still reviews what goes out.
What still needs a person
Greeting visitors and running the front office. Someone has to be physically there.
Ordering supplies. Partly automatable, since an agent can track usage and draft the order, but someone should approve spending and handle supplier relationships.
Ad hoc support for the owner. By definition this is unpredictable, and it often involves judgment, discretion and knowing the people involved.
Judgment calls everywhere else. The overdue customer who's been with you for twenty years. The supplier invoice that's technically right but feels off. The email that needs a phone call instead.
What that means for the hire
This doesn't mean you shouldn't hire. It means you might need a different hire than the posting describes. A few common outcomes:
- A smaller role. Part-time front office and judgment work, with the repeatable duties handled by agents.
- A different role. Someone who reviews and handles exceptions rather than keying data, which is more interesting work and easier to keep people in.
- No hire for now. The current team keeps up once the repeatable work is off their plates.
Any of these can be the right answer. The point is to decide with the duties in front of you, not by default.
Try it on your own posting
Take the posting you're about to publish, or the job description of the person who's overloaded, and sort every duty into three columns:
- Repeatable with clear right answers. Strong candidate for AI with a check.
- Repeatable but needs judgment. AI prepares, a person decides.
- Needs a person. Physical presence, relationships, accountability.
If you'd like a second opinion, paste the duties into the role breakdown tool on my site. It runs in your browser and shows which duties map to an agent workflow and which need a person. Or send me the posting and I'll tell you how I'd cover it.