What a Personal AI Assistant Should Do for You

Most people never write this job description down, which is why most people are disappointed. You get access to something capable, you ask it a few clever questions, it answers well, and then you go back to doing your day exactly as before. The tool was fine. The job was never defined.

So treat this the way you would treat hiring a person. What is on their desk every morning before you arrive? What do they do when you ask? What is above their pay grade, permanently? Answer those three questions and you have a working assistant instead of an expensive habit of asking questions.

On Sistava, the Personal Assistant role already arrives shaped for that job description. Alice and Bob come with the inbox, calendar, drafting, and daily brief duties built in, plus a permission line that decides which of them happen without asking you. Your work is telling them the details that only you know.

What should a personal AI assistant do every single day?

Four things, before you sit down, without being asked. Read and sort the overnight mail. Check tomorrow and today's calendar for conflicts, missing agendas, and unprepared meetings. Draft replies to anything routine. Then write you a brief that says what needs you and summarises the rest in one paragraph.

That last part is the one people underrate. A pile of sorted email is still a pile. The brief is what turns the work into a decision list, and a good brief is short enough to read while the kettle boils. If yours runs to two screens, the sorting rules need tightening, not the writing.

What should it do when you ask, rather than on a schedule?

The one-off jobs that break your concentration when you do them yourself. Research a company before a call. Compare three options and give you a recommendation. Find that thing you were sent in March. Turn your voice note into a written summary. Book a flight within the rules you gave her.

These are not the impressive jobs and that is the point. Each one costs you eight to twenty minutes and, worse, costs you the thread of whatever you were doing. Handing them off is worth more than the minutes suggest, because the minutes were never the expensive part.

The test for whether something belongs here is simple. If you can describe the finished result in one sentence and you would not be embarrassed to ask a competent person to do it, hand it over. If describing it takes longer than doing it, do it yourself and move on.

A worked example: Samuel turned a real job description into the brief

Samuel directs a small education nonprofit in Nairobi. Two years ago he wrote a job description for a part-time assistant, costed it, and shelved it because the budget was never there. When he set up an AI assistant, he opened that old document and pasted most of it in as the brief. It is the best starting point anyone in this cluster of stories had.

The document already listed the duties in plain language: manage the director's diary, screen incoming correspondence, prepare briefing notes before funder meetings, track grant reporting deadlines, and draft routine replies. He deleted the parts about answering the office phone and being on site, added the names of his four funders and two board members, and that was the brief.

The duty that surprised him was grant deadline tracking. He had been holding eleven reporting dates across four funders in his head and a spreadsheet he updated badly. Now the ones inside three weeks appear at the top of his morning brief with the draft covering note already written. He has not missed one since, and he had missed two the year before.

What did not work was funder relationship writing. His assistant drafts the reports and the routine correspondence, but anything with genuine warmth in it Samuel writes himself, because the funders give money to him and not to an office. He says the split is obvious in hindsight: the administration is a job, the relationships are the work.

What should a personal AI assistant never do?

Anything where being wrong costs more than being slow. This is the part of the job description most people leave blank, and it is the part that decides whether you keep the assistant or quietly stop using it. Write it down before you need it, not after something goes out that should not have.

• Speak for you in a hard moment. An apology that matters, bad news, ending a relationship, a complaint about someone. She can help you think it through. She is not the voice.
• Move money. Payments, transfers, invoice approvals, anything touching a card or a bank. Prepare and flag, yes. Press the button, never.
• Decide anything legal, medical, or tax. She can gather documents, summarise a contract, and prepare your questions. The decision belongs to you and a qualified human.
• Publish a specific fact unchecked. Numbers in a proposal, dates in a contract, a name in a public post. She produces something plausible when unsure. You check.
• Handle the relationship that is the actual job. If someone stays because they like dealing with you, automate the scheduling around that, never the dealing itself.

How do you hand over this job description?

Write it down, hire someone to do it, connect what they need, and set the line between acting and asking. Half an hour, in this order. The order matters because each step gives the next one something it needs.

1. Write the duties out first — Before you sign up for anything, list what you want off your desk. The daily standing duties, then the on-demand ones. If you ever wrote a job description for a human assistant, open it, because most of it still applies.
2. Hire the assistant — Create a workspace and hire the Personal Assistant role. You get a private AI Employee with her own memory and her own connected accounts, rather than a shared chat that starts from nothing every visit.
3. Connect inbox and calendar — Two of the three core duties are impossible without them. This is the normal sign in screen, not a technical step, and it is the one people delay for no good reason.
4. Paste in the duties and the context — Your list, plus who the important people are, how you want to sound, and what must never interrupt you. Name people literally. Vague briefs produce vague work, and you will feel that by day two.
5. Set the line and the start time — Which duties happen alone, which wait for your yes, and what hour she starts each morning. The schedule is what makes it a job rather than a tool you have to remember to open.

One honest note about the job description. The duties you resent most are usually the ones you are worst at describing, because you have never had to explain them to anyone. Push through that. Ten minutes of awkward writing about how you handle your inbox is worth more than any amount of tinkering later.

The whole difference between an assistant and a clever tool is whether it knows what its job is when you are not in the room. Write the three standing duties, name what needs your yes, name what is never hers, and let tomorrow morning show you the gap you have been living with.