Episode Summary

In this episode, I’m answering a question that continues to come up with business owners and our clients: What should AI handle, what should a virtual assistant handle, and what still needs you as the leader?

AI can be incredibly helpful for brainstorming, first drafts, summarizing information, organizing ideas, and identifying next steps. But I think of AI as an assistant, not an independent decision-maker. The work still needs human review, context, and judgment.

That’s where a capable VA comes in. A VA can review and refine AI-generated work, verify details, apply your company’s voice and standards, coordinate deadlines and communication, and make sure the work actually gets across the finish line.

I also share how our own team uses AI within our marketing process, along with why clear policies around human review, privacy, and appropriate AI use are so important.

When you’re deciding who should own a task, ask yourself:

1. Does it need ideas, a first draft, or organization? Use AI.
2. Does it need judgment, context, coordination, or follow-through? Give it to your VA.
3. Does it need strategy or final approval? Keep it with the leader.

The goal is to get the right work into the right hands so you and your team can move forward with less overwhelm.

Key Highlights:

• Use AI to brainstorm, draft, summarize, and organize.
• Use your VA for review, context, coordination, and follow-through.
• Keep strategy and final approval with the leader.
• Establish clear boundaries for how your team uses AI.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more!

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Hello, my name is Melissa Swink, and I'm the founder and CEO of Melissa Swink Co., which is a virtual assistant services agency that provides administrative, marketing, and operations support for small businesses and nonprofits. Today I'm excited to talk to you about a topic that's continuing to come up not only in my industry, but also with our clients. These are some frequently asked questions that I've been getting lately around AI versus VA and how to determine who should own what.

And what is going to be the most efficient for you to get more done without the overwhelm. And so I wanted to take a step back just to set the tone for our conversation today and share more about why does getting things done or why does execution feel so overwhelming to so many business owners? The thing is, is that we have a lot of ideas, we have a lot of things that we want to do, and we want we have goals that we want to reach and accomplish.

But executing them just requires so many steps, right? We need to first of all decide what needs to happen. Maybe there's a first draft that needs to be created. There's a lot of organization involved in, you know, executing on a project or doing a launch or what have you. There's a lot of coordinating with people and deadlines and having conversations and getting the right people in the right seats in order to help you. And then there's once you get those people in the right seats and they're doing the work.

You've got to review it. You've got to answer questions and ultimately make the final decisions before publishing or completing that final task that makes that project become complete. And I think what happens is overwhelm happens when the business owner tries to personally manage every single step in the process. And I would go a step further to say trying to manage it.

But then also having to manage it because they are the central connection for all of the information and the people who are involved with the process. So today we want to answer the ultimate question is what can AI help with and what still requires a capable human? And for a capable human, we want to look at you know your team, your VA, and what are you ultimately going to be involved in or what you need to still be involved in.

And because we are we know that we're not gonna be completely inset it and forget it. We do want to be evaluating each part of the process to make sure that everything is aligned and on track. So we're gonna talk through this step by step. So let's talk about what AI can do. AI is best used for things like brainstorming ideas. I love to use it for creating first drafts or outlines or even checklists.

I love to use AI for summarizing notes or even documents and things. I love to upload transcripts from conversations that I've had and help AI have AI help me summarize the conversation in order to be able to pass things along to my team or others, help me to evaluate what are my next steps, who do I need to get involved, all those sorts of things. And a similar note, organizing information.

There are times when I'm working with a client and I need to upload some PDFs and some documents to help it have it help me start analyzing and summarizing some things. It also is great for improving like maybe clarity, tone, formatting on different things. Maybe I have a rough draft of something or I'll say, hey chat, here's something that I want to say, here's what I want to convey. And it polishes that for me and I make a few tweaks and then I'm moving on. I also love to have chat suggest next steps.

And so sometimes when I'm working on a project, I'll say, here's here's the high-level overview, here's what we're launching. We have we're in the middle of a launch right now, it's very exciting. We'll share more. pay pay attention to our social media feeds and you'll you'll hear more about some of the things that we're working on, and I'll share in future videos. But one thing that I keep asking chat is okay, what's our next step? What else do we need? Because I have a general plan in my mind of what needs to happen and when. but chat sometimes will make some recommendations like.

You know, if we're doing this type of work with a client, I think we need some sort of standardized skill for evaluating, you know, this different area of their business and so on. So I love to use AI as an assistant, but not an independent decision maker. We are not yet at that point. So use AI as a starting curr point, a creation point, and then the output essentially needs human review.

So let's talk about the human review piece because that does not mean AI got us this far, or even if AI gets you the first 25%, or maybe even drafting, it gets you 90% there. What is that remaining piece before we can finally put our stamp of approval on it? And who should be handling that? So let's talk about what a virtual assistant should do. So a VA is best suited for reviewing and refining the work that AI has generated.

Maybe checking facts, right? Sometimes AI hallucinates, right? And so sometimes it'll pull together a figure like 40% of you know industry experts say blah blah blah. And you're like, well, what industry experts? And how do you get that percentage? It does happen. And certainly you don't want to be that fool who posts that information somewhere and sends that to a client, and they're like, Where did you get this information? And you can't back it up, right? You know exactly what I'm talking about. So verifying, fact checking.

Checking dates, checking links, checking the details just to make sure that everything is factually correct. you also might want your VA to then run it through the lens of applying, you know, overall context, maybe company voice, brand standards, and things like that. So again, AI did a great job drafting the first 80%. And then we need to polish it, put it into our voice just a little bit better.

put things maybe on our company branding, things like that. a VA is also very necessary for managing tasks, deadlines, files, communication, all the organizational pieces that AI maybe cannot extend to, at least not as of yet. We know that even in the beginning of this year, from the beginning of this year until now, work has changed quite a bit, right? Because we had Claude Cowork come out.

We have chat work out now and you know there's so many advancements in the AI space that, you know, as of this recording, we still, you know, need that human component for managing some of those items that require much larger context, right? A VA is also great for following up when things stall. So maybe we sent something out to somebody in order to complete something, or we sent a question out to somebody, they haven't gotten back to us yet. A VA is great for for keeping track of those communications.

Ultimately, what a VA should be doing is preparing work for approval. So publishing, sending, scheduling, completing the tasks once that's authorized. So let's talk more about some boundaries before we dive into what you, the business owner, the leader, need to be involved in in this execution piece. So let's talk about an AI policy. If you don't already have one for your company, your organization,

This is something that is absolutely relevant for everyone. It's something that we have been finalizing and have rolled out to our team, but we want our policy to require a responsible team member to review and improve all AI assisted work before it's sent to a client, before it's published, before it's moved to a final folder, before it's executed on. We want all of that. Let's also talk some more about

boundaries and policies and things that should be in place in using AI for your company or your organization. A VA should also help us determine whether AI use is appropriate for the client or the task. Now we certainly have some clients that have expressed their preference that they do not want any AI assisting the work that we're doing with their company. So they don't want the note takers in the Zoom calls. They don't want us taking meeting

meeting notes and uploading them to AI. We don't they don't want AI generating their content and information. They work in very sensitive industries and they do not want any risk of anything confidential coming out. So that's something that we absolutely need to be aware of and it is a hard pass for those team members involved with those clients to be leveraging AI in in any way, shape or form. VAs also need to understand what information is safe and necessary to share with AI.

Maybe we're not sharing full information, or maybe we are removing any identifying information from financial statements, for example. We don't want any sensitive information being uploaded to the AI. We also need to make sure, even on a on a purely you know baseline level, making sure that we have opted out of our AI being our AI systems and things being used for training new models, right? We want to opt out of that so everything is extremely private.

And even taking a step back further from that on like kind of basis level. I realize I'm kind of jumping around here a little bit, but you want to be using a paid AI tool. Using the free versions are not going to protect you from some of that secure and private information. We also need to have the VA determine again whether the output is accurate and complete. We talked about that being factually accurate.

we also need to ensure that everybody on the team understands that human approval, human review and approval needs to be taken in order for that thing to go out, right? So AI again might help you prepare an email, for example, but a human needs to review it, maybe make some tweaks and editing before it is ultimately sent. Okay. I'm gonna give you an example of just a basic task, even creating this YouTube.

video for today or recording this podcast video for today, but depending on where you're listening or viewing to this information. So we have in our company a general AI or excuse me, our marketing calendar which share which outlines the topics that we're going to be sharing throughout the year. So what I like to do is I like to sit down with chat and tell it chat I need a video outline that is about this topic. And then it asks me a series of questions to confirm

the direction that I want to take with the video, things that I want to make sure that I incorporate, some examples I want to share, and it generates brainstorming or brainstorms titles for the video, creates the first draft of the outline, and you know, any calls to action, any suggestions in terms of resources that might be able to provide it, things like that. So I have chat kind of prepare that initial.

Outline for the video. And then I take it and I put my own spin on it. Certainly, I kind of add in and sprinkle in some personal examples or things that I've seen work well for clients or things we're doing with our team and so on. And then obviously, I'm sitting down and I'm recording this video for you all today. Once this video is recorded, then my team gets involved. And my team, when they get involved, they are also using AI to some degree. So certainly our copywriter.

is receiving this transcript and she's going to make this into a blog post that is formatted correctly and keyworded appropriately for our website. She's probably using her AI tool to help her with that and make some final edits and things before that ultimately comes back for review and approval. My podcast manager and marketing coordinator is taking this and uploading it and generating a couple of things helping with show notes, helping with

The video description helping create some social media posts around this very topic based on the things that I'm sharing today. They're all using AI tools to help them with that. Then they are ultimately reviewing what is AI is producing and putting their edits on it, and then everything comes back to me for final approval. Once that's approved, then it gets posted and shared to the masses. You get the idea, but I just wanted to share kind of a basic example of

How we're saving time with that. And I can tell you that that saves my team many, many hours, even just on a monthly basis, because again, our copywriter is no longer having to maybe review this outline or be even before I was using AI to help with outlines and things, I would jot an outline down, right? I'd have a sheet of paper and I'd have kind of my my notes in front of me, make sure that I stayed.

you know, in the direction that I wanted to stay, I'd take a picture and send it to her. And then if she wasn't clear, she might have to even ask for access to the video so she could get better understanding of where I was headed and write that blog from basically scratch, right? Or even my assistant, she would need to you know, maybe upload the video and request an AI transcript, maybe from like Otter or Rev or something like that. And then she would pull out show notes and things. So we've come a long

In terms of saving time, and it's really exciting and it's helping us execute much, much quicker. So ultimately, as we bring this video to a close, I want you to ask yourself three questions. So when you have a task or you're working on a project, you need you have something that you and your team need to execute on. Does this, your question number one is: does this need ideas? Is it in brainstorming stage? Does it need a first draft? Does it need some general organization?

That is a great that is a great task for AI. Question number two is does this need judgment? Does it need context? Does it need coordination? Does it need follow-through? That would be great for your VA to handle for you. And then finally, question number three is does this strategy, does this need strategy or final approval? And that stays with the leader. Okay. So in closing, just to wrap everything up.

AI can absolutely help you and your team move faster. And a skilled VA is going to help you ensure that the work that AI is initially creating is accurate, appropriate, and actually completed. So think about it this way take one project that feels overwhelming right now, or maybe something that has stalled out, and break it into those categories. What can AI help draft or get started for you and your team? What can your VA manage?

And then what ultimately still needs your decision or approval. And I will also take a step back here to say if you're realizing that too much of the follow-through and too much of the decision making and the direction is still landing on you, even with leveraging these tools, even with working with your team, I would invite you to schedule a consultation with me. I would love to just talk through and help you identify.

What might be able to be delegated more efficiently, or additional things that could be delegated, and where the right support can step in and help you continue moving forward with less overwhelm. Thank you so much for taking the time to watch and listen in today. And I will be back next month with another tip, tool, strategy, and concept to help you grow your business or organization beyond you. Have a wonderful day. Take care. Bye-bye.