AI assistants for office teams: what they can and cannot do

An AI assistant is software that reads and writes text. A lot of office work is text: email, forms, notes, reports and the questions that come with them. Set up well, an assistant does the first pass on that work, and your team keeps its time for the parts that need a person.

Set up badly, it writes confident text that is wrong. Here is what it can do for an office team, where it goes wrong and how we build one that stays useful and safe.

Four jobs an assistant does well

Four kinds of work suit an assistant best:

• Drafting. First versions of replies, quotes and routine letters, in your tone and from your templates.
• Sorting. Reading incoming email, forms and documents, then sending each one to the right person or folder.
• Summarizing. Turning a long email thread, a meeting recording or a 40-page report into the few points someone needs.
• Answering. Replying to common questions from your own documents and rules: price lists, policies, procedures. Not from the open web.

An assistant is only as good as what you give it. We connect it to the documents your team already uses, and we work with you to write down the rules it must follow.

A person approves what matters

The assistant drafts. A person decides. Anything with real consequences goes through a person first: a reply to a client, a price, a change to a record, anything that commits your company. Low-risk work, like sorting email into folders, can run on its own once you trust it. You decide where the line is, and you can move it later.

Say your team gets the same questions from suppliers every week: when payments go out, where to send an invoice, what it must include. The assistant reads each new email, finds the answer in your payment policy and drafts a reply that names the document it used. A person reads the draft, fixes what is off and clicks Send. If the answer is not in your documents, the assistant says so and leaves the email for a person.

Where it goes wrong, and how we guard against it

The first risk is made-up answers. An AI model writes text that sounds right. When it does not know the answer, it can still produce one, with the same confidence. The second risk is missing context. The assistant knows only what it can read. It knows nothing about last week’s phone call, a special deal with one client or the rule everyone follows but nobody wrote down.

We build four guards into every assistant:

• Sources. It answers from your documents and shows which one it used, so a person can check it quickly.
• Review steps. Anything that matters waits for a person. Unclear cases go to a person by default.
• Logs. It records what came in, what it did and who approved it. When something goes wrong, you can see why.
• An off switch. One step turns it off. Your team goes back to the manual way while we fix the problem.

We also test each assistant on real cases from your own inbox before it goes live.

Personal information and Law 25

Office work is full of personal information: names, email addresses, phone numbers, sometimes more sensitive details. In Quebec, Law 25 sets rules for how companies handle it. This is not legal advice. In plain terms, three habits matter.

Know what data goes where. For each assistant, write down what information it reads, which services receive it, where they store it and for how long. Some AI services run outside Quebec, and the law requires a privacy impact assessment before personal information leaves the province.

Keep it to what is needed. An assistant that answers supplier questions does not need anyone’s home address or social insurance number. The less personal information it sees, the less can go wrong.

Name a person responsible. Law 25 requires every business to have a person in charge of protecting personal information. By default, it is the person with the highest authority in the company, who can delegate the role in writing. That person should know about every assistant you run and what it handles.

We document these three points with you before anything goes live. For questions about your own obligations, talk to a lawyer.

If your team spends its days drafting, sorting and answering the same questions, send us one of those tasks. Within 24 hours, we reply and tell you plainly where an assistant would help, and where it would not. If you want to go further, we can talk it through on a call.