From secretary to augmented secretarial support: what the sources say

The page on the secretary profession published by Onisep (the French public information service on careers and training) describes a post through which pass the reception of visitors, telephone messages, appointment booking, the writing of correspondence and the filing of documents. Daily work varies with the workplace: at a notary’s office, an architect’s, in a law firm or in a small or medium-sized construction company. Executive secretary posts carry wider responsibilities.

The page also notes that the computerisation of departments has relieved secretaries of many basic office tasks, which frees up time for organisation: managing diaries, preparing meetings, trips or trade fairs. Lastly, it mentions that some secretaries work remotely and answer the phone on behalf of businesses, paid by a remote secretarial (télésecrétariat) company or by several businesses.

On employment, the same page states that headcounts have been falling for some years and that no growth is expected in the coming years, despite many retirements. It also notes that the supply of graduates is large. The page does not give the date of these findings: they should be read as a trend, not as a figure.

The report “Les métiers en 2030” (“Jobs in 2030”) by France Stratégie (a French government policy-analysis body) and Dares (the statistics department of the French labour ministry), in its March 2022 summary, offers a compatible reading. It places executive secretaries among the occupations typically held in the second part of a career, in which employment is not growing and where vacancies could be filled more easily by promoted professionals. It also describes the occupation of company administrative employee as not very dynamic. These are projections to 2030 based on assumptions, not findings, and they concern broader categories of occupation than telephone reception alone.

In its Working Paper No. 140 (2025), the International Labour Organization (ILO) states that clerical occupations remain those with the highest levels of exposure to generative AI. Exposure does not mean replacement: the authors specify that, since most occupations include tasks that require human input, job transformation is the most likely effect.

For secretarial work, the reasonable reading is therefore twofold. Certain tightly framed tasks, such as answering a routine question or noting a message, can be entrusted to a tool. The rest of the job, made up of judgement calls and relationships, changes shape without the sources announcing its disappearance.

Onisep describes the qualities expected: organisation, method, discretion, courtesy, autonomy, and the ability to prioritise and to deal with emergencies. Our reading is that these qualities correspond to what a tool reproduces poorly: knowing when a request falls outside the framework, gauging the importance of a call for the manager, reassuring a worried person, taking responsibility for a decision.

This is also what justifies keeping a person in the loop. A tool that picks up in place of the secretarial team carries neither the relationship of trust with customers nor responsibility for decisions; it frees up time for those tasks, provided that what falls to it has been defined.

The term “augmented secretarial support” is used here to mean a division of tasks: the tool absorbs what is repetitive and well framed, and the person keeps what requires judgement. To place it in your organisation, list the secretarial tasks over a week and sort them into three groups: repetitive (opening hours, address, message taking), requiring a decision (a quote, a dispute) and relational (an unhappy customer, an important partner). Only the first group is a natural candidate for delegation.

Alyas can take on the telephone part of this first group: it answers 24/7 from the information you provide, announces that it is an AI and that the call is recorded, collects contact details, offers an appointment if Google Calendar or Cal.com is connected, and places the transcript and summary in your workspace. If it does not know, it says so and offers to pass the request on; the caller can also ask to be transferred to the single number you have defined. The trial is free for 10 days, with no card required.