As the world of work changes rapidly, executive assistants (EAs) and CHROs are experiencing a transformation in their roles with AI models making massive advances in streamlining tasks and enhancing decision-making.
At The Capital Apartments, CPO John Skelton and EA Belinda van Zyl are using it to streamline tasks and enhance employee experiences. Over at Absa Group, managing executive for talent management and transitions KG Bako and EA Sindi Dimba are using it to accelerate leadership development and improve decision-making, and at Stor-Age Property REIT, head of people Aba Ayirebi and HR assistant Christine Hanekom are turning AI into a tool for strategic insight.
According to John Skelton, CPO at The Capital Apartments, AI isn’t a future disruption but a present-day accelerator, pushing his role firmly into more strategic heights.
“The CPO role is becoming increasingly strategic, and AI is acting as an accelerant. I see my role evolving in three major ways: through making decisions more intelligently through data, elevating employee experiences and enabling culture transformation,” he says.
“With AI streamlining data analysis and even running the initial pre-screening recruitment process, my focus will shift from manually gathering workforce insights to interpreting AI-driven predictions and trends, which will enable faster, evidence-based decisions on everything from talent acquisition to retention,” he elaborates.
“Beyond analytics, it allows us to personalise the employee journey, from onboarding to career development, at a level that was never scalable before. I will be focusing more on curating meaningful human experiences enhanced by technology, rather than managing processes,” he adds.
As AI redefines job roles and workforce needs, John believes in taking the lead in guiding employees through transformation.
“A big part of my role will be guiding the organisation through this transformation - identifying evolving skills needed, championing reskilling programmes and ensuring our culture remains inclusive, adaptable and human-centric.”
He also believes that AI will elevate the partnership between CHROs and EAs by freeing the latter from the purely operational, to enable more strategic collaboration.
“CHROs and EAs can then spend more time on strategic culture planning, internal communications and further developing high-performance environments, essential in a world where speed and adaptability are key. AI will not replace the human side of HR – it will amplify it,” he notes.
Navigating a new landscape
Belinda van Zyl, EA to John, resonates with this as she also sees AI as a tool that allows her to revolutionise her role.
“AI is here already and no longer a future thought. My role now is to utilise this new tool and to navigate the new landscape and to stay abreast of what is happening,” she says.
For Belinda, the question she asks herself daily is simple: “Can AI do this?” If the answer is yes, she delegates it to tech, freeing up time to focus on more strategic matters and ultimately having a positive impact on the greater organisation too.
“As an EA,” she explains, “one needs to learn to navigate the new AI-dominated world and use AI as a tool. EAs, however, should not lose touch with being the human connectors that they are. EAs generally have very strong emotional intelligence that sets them apart from AI, so yes, use AI, but the human element should never be lost.”
For KG Bako, the managing executive for talent management and transitions at Absa Group, the promise of AI lies in its ability to deepen strategic priorities. She shares some of the ways she sees it evolving her role.
- Leadership enablement: Through AI-driven leadership analytics, development programmes can be tailored, to empower leaders with the skills needed to navigate an AI-driven workplace, identify gaps in DEIB representation, suggest unbiased hiring practices, and track inclusion metrics.
- Enhanced talent management: AI will revolutionise talent acquisition and development by reducing bias in hiring processes, identifying hidden talent pools and offering personalised career and learning pathways as well as benefits.
- Technology-driven digital enablement: Leveraging AI tools allows for the automation of routine human capital tasks, freeing up resources to focus on strategic initiatives. AI-powered analytics will also enable predictive workforce planning and real-time decision-making.
“My role will be to drive the integration of AI into our human capital strategy in a way that enhances human potential while ensuring technology serves as an enabler of meaningful work and organisational growth,” she says.
Sindi Dimba, EA to KG, says, “AI will elevate the CHRO-EA partnership by automating routine tasks and enabling both roles to focus on higher-value contributions.”
“It’s already enabling me to be more efficient in how I support my executive and how fast I can respond to the executive team. We must foster a culture that embraces AI as a collaborative tool rather than a replacement for jobs,” Sindi adds.
Better armed
Already enjoying improved efficiencies and faster turnaround times due to AI, Aba Ayirebi, head of people at Stor-Age Property REIT Ltd, believes the future of HR will be significantly more data-driven. Tools that support performance management, succession planning and workforce forecasting will become more precise and accessible.
“The role of a CHRO is complex with several conflicting and demanding priorities, all happening simultaneously. The use of AI allows us to be better armed with data-driven insights with a direct effect on the business. AI allows us to collate and analyse large sums of data, which allows us to learn which metrics make us more effective and efficient at what we do and, inversely, which information no longer serves the business and can be done away with in order to pay more attention to vital key performance areas,” she says.
“AI also allows us to simultaneously reach several touchpoints – we have internally built an onboarding system that has significantly improved our onboarding process and engagement experience.”
With AI also having the ability to flag anomalies, draft replies, or manage calendars, Aba acknowledges that it can’t read the room, and that’s where assistants shine.
“Unfortunately, with the invention of virtual assistants, this may also affect the need to maintain large teams of purely clerical functions; however, as with all things people, a refined EQ and the softer skills should always form the heart of decision-making, and so executive assistants will remain a necessity,“ she highlights.
According to Christine Hanekom, HR assistant at Stor-Age Property REIT Ltd, AI should not be seen as something separate from human skills but rather as a tool to complement the human skills to get the most information about your workforce in the most efficient way.
“I believe that the role of the HR assistant will evolve into one of providing strategic insights about the workforce. By using AI to gather simplistic data, such as to screen candidates and to search for patterns in employee movements, you will be able to create a database of different insights which can then be used for strategic reporting on the workforce trends within your organisation. I think it would be important to develop and maintain strong soft skills,” she says.
“In an age where you can ask AI to collate all your data and sort through the information for you, it is important to maintain the human aspect of human resources. Knowing that AI can be a useful tool for your team, such as a chatbot to answer simple employee queries, but also knowing that there will be gaps in the help that AI can provide and making sure that your skills are filling that gap.”
She noted that having the soft skills to remain relevant within your team and your organisation is the key to staying ahead in the AI-powered workplace.
Try it, don’t fear it
Professor Steven Sidley, a leading AI expert and professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, suggested that the best way for executive assistants to embrace AI is simply to experiment with it, and have some fun in the process.
“EAs should be given a ‘smile research task’ – something like ‘write a four-page paper on the history of tennis, fashion, or movies’. They can use the ‘Deep Research’ option on platforms like DeepSeek or Claude. It won’t take more than five minutes, and they’ll immediately see how powerful AI can be – and it’ll be fun.”
According to Steven, EAs can become more proficient than their executives within just a few days. “It requires almost no training to get them to this level,” he stated.
He also advised EAs to diversify their toolsets: “EAs should no longer use Google Search at all and should use only Perplexity.ai for search. This will make them more comfortable in using AI for daily tasks,” he added.
“EAs should be taught or encouraged to use plain English for queries and not to worry about spelling or grammar and to ask much more complex questions than are asked in Google.”
