Leveraging AI: A Playbook for Administrative Professionals
In a world where AI is transforming every workplace, administrative professionals have a choice: fear the change or lead it.
This practical guide turns uncertainty into opportunity. Written specifically for Executive Assistants, Administrative Coordinators, Program Managers, and Chiefs of Staff, Leveraging AI equips you to use modern AI tools to work smarter—not harder.
You’ll learn how to:
-Automate email, calendar, and scheduling workflows
-Run meetings without chaos using transcription and recap tools
-Streamline travel and event planning in minutes
-Build systems, SOPs, and onboarding flows that run themselves
-Think and operate strategically—stepping into a Chief of Staff mindset
Packed with real-world prompts, ready-to-use workflows, and clear ethical guardrails, this book gives you everything you need to future-proof your role while amplifying your impact.
Whether you’re curious about AI or ready to master it, this playbook is your roadmap to becoming indispensable in the modern workplace.
📌 AI won’t replace you. But someone who knows how to use it might.
Leveraging AI: A Playbook for Administrative Professionals
In a world where AI is transforming every workplace, administrative professionals have a choice: fear the change or lead it.
This practical guide turns uncertainty into opportunity. Written specifically for Executive Assistants, Administrative Coordinators, Program Managers, and Chiefs of Staff, Leveraging AI equips you to use modern AI tools to work smarter—not harder.
You’ll learn how to:
-Automate email, calendar, and scheduling workflows
-Run meetings without chaos using transcription and recap tools
-Streamline travel and event planning in minutes
-Build systems, SOPs, and onboarding flows that run themselves
-Think and operate strategically—stepping into a Chief of Staff mindset
Packed with real-world prompts, ready-to-use workflows, and clear ethical guardrails, this book gives you everything you need to future-proof your role while amplifying your impact.
Whether you’re curious about AI or ready to master it, this playbook is your roadmap to becoming indispensable in the modern workplace.
📌 AI won’t replace you. But someone who knows how to use it might.
Artificial Intelligence isn’t magic, and it isn’t a mystery.
It’s software — a collection of digital tools that recognize patterns and use those patterns to make predictions or suggestions. In other words, AI helps you think with your computer instead of through it.
For Administrative Professionals, this isn’t about turning you into a programmer. It’s about giving you a second set of capable hands that never tire.
What AI Really Is
Think of AI as a pattern-recognition engine. It learns from billions of examples and then uses what it has learned to complete new tasks.
When you ask an AI tool to draft an email, it doesn’t “know” your organization. It looks at patterns in language, tone, and structure from similar writing and predicts what text will fit next. The result feels intelligent because the pattern-matching is extremely fast and well-trained.
◆ Key Idea: AI is powerful because it has seen a lot of data — not because it understands that data like a human does.
How AI Learns — in Plain English
Most of today’s AI is built on a system called a large language model (LLM). Here’s what happens behind the scenes:
Data Input – Millions of pages of writing, reports, and web text are fed into the model.
Pattern Training – The system learns what words, phrases, and sentence structures usually follow one another.
Prediction and Response – AI predicts what comes next based on those patterns when you type a request.
Feedback Loop – As users correct or rate answers, the model adjusts future predictions.
That’s it: no emotions, opinions, or independent thought — just patterns refined by repetition.
Why This Matters to You
Every day, you already use tools that rely on AI:
Email clients that suggest replies
Calendars that propose meeting times
Search bars that finish your sentences
Phones that recognize your voice commands
Those are small, focused forms of artificial intelligence.
Generative AI brings all those capabilities into one place and lets you apply them creatively to your work.
When you learn to use these tools deliberately, you can:
Draft and polish messages faster
Summarize reports or meeting notes in minutes
Create first-pass documents, agendas, or SOPs for later refinement
Research background information without wading through pages of search
results AI does the mechanical lifting; you bring the context, tone, and
judgment.
Are you a weary administrator or an admin professional overwhelmed by a relentlessly rising workload? Do you perform repetitive tasks all the time that you wish a machine could do for you instead? Are you desperately seeking help to manage your primary, lifelong, effort-intensive activity—communication—more efficiently? Then, Leveraging AI: A Playbook for Administrative Professionals by JT Souder may be the godsend you’re looking for.
This concise book, written by an admin professional with over three decades of experience in administrative and university leadership roles, shows you how to automate your activities for optimal performance—without compromising efficiency, reliability, accountability, or security. It puts you firmly in control of your work while simultaneously rewarding you with significant time and resource savings.
Your lifesaver is artificial intelligence (AI), the enigmatic rising star of technology that’s revolutionizing administrative functions across the globe.
Before going further, we have one big hurdle to cross: you’ve probably heard that AI is evil, so you rightly have some apprehensions about it. Maybe you worry that it’s a tool designed to replace humans, take their jobs... and ultimately ruin lives!
This book invites you to discover AI for yourself and then reconsider your fears. A closer examination will convince you that while concerns such as the “replace humans and take away jobs” theory are definitely plausible, they aren't really true, for the simple reason that AI cannot match humans at higher levels of cogitation, e.g., it can spew out complex, high-sounding sentences without knowing what they mean! For instance, a human who hears the warning “A tsunami is approaching—flee” will instantly grasp the danger and run, but to an AI, the sentence is just another string of words, no different from “It’s a sunny day—let’s go fishing.” Therefore, indifferent to the danger, it will not move away and will suffer whatever destruction the tsunami wreaks upon it!!
Similarly, AIs lack emotion, feelings, judgment, wisdom, etc., so that humans are much above them, and they cannot replace us.
After convincing you that AI is only a powerful assistant that aids in doing work smarter and faster (not rule you, ever!)—the book takes you on a tour of admin activities you can automate immediately using popular AIs such as Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
I enjoyed reading this very short book and consider it outstanding (5 stars) because of its:
1. Excellent readability (it uses an extra-large font and generous spacing)
2. Starts you off with a clear, non-technical introduction to AI
3. Very simple, accessible language
4. Concise, relevant, and up-to-date content
5. Brief, spot-on, turnkey advice with examples that admin professionals can deploy right away
6. High credibility, coming from a seasoned expert in the field
That said, it contains a few minor English/other errors, but they do not diminish the book’s value.
The nature of the book automatically defines the target audience: English-speaking admin professionals and professionals in related functions like the CEO’s/President’s office, HR—and to a lesser degree—Finance, Payroll, Facilities, etc. It's most suitable for the USA, followed by other democratic nations, and then other forms of government. I wholeheartedly recommend it to readers in all applicable categories.