Can an agent do admin work?
Mostly. The inbox triage, the filing, the chasing, the scheduling, the form-filling — an agent does the great majority of what a competent assistant does. What it lacks is knowing which of your relationships need care.
- Hours back per week
- 14
- Human cost
- €2,000–3,800/mo for an assistant
- Agent cost
- €40–120/mo
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Triage the inbox
YESSorts by what actually needs you, drafts the routine replies, files the rest.
Schedule and reschedule
YESHandles timezones, buffers, travel time and the four-way reschedule.
Chase people
YESPolitely, indefinitely, without the social cost a person would feel.
Fill in forms and portals
YESFrom documents it already has. Tedious and entirely automatable.
Book travel
MOSTLYFinds and assembles good options. Booking spends money, so keep approval.
Manage your priorities
HALFIt sees your calendar, not your politics.
- Yours
Handle a sensitive request
NOT YETWhen someone senior is upset, an assistant’s judgement is the entire value.
4/6 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- Sensitive communication
- Anything that spends money
- Deciding what matters this week
How this goes wrong
Auto-replying to a message that needed thirty seconds of thought. Inbox agents should draft rather than send until you have watched them for a month.
What it needs access to
- Calendar
- Drive
- Task tracker
- Travel and expense tools
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my assistant. Each morning, triage my inbox into: needs me today, needs me this week, you can handle, and noise. Draft replies for the ones you can handle and leave them in drafts — do not send. Schedule anything that needs scheduling, protecting my focus blocks and leaving 15 minutes between meetings. Chase anyone who owes me something, following up every three days. Fill in routine forms using documents in Drive and show me before submitting. Research travel options and present three; do not book. Never reply to anything from [named people], anything about pricing, or anything with a complaint in it.
Questions people ask
Should an agent have my whole inbox?
It needs broad read access to be useful and narrow send permissions to be safe. Draft-only is the correct starting configuration, and most people find they never move off it for external mail.
Want the part that works actually running?
The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to Email and Calendar, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.
Set up an admin and back office agentThis site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.