AI vs VAs

Here's a quick sounding board for your fantastic AI idea if it involves outsourcing human labour to AI: Why hasn't that labour been outsourced to cheap overseas virtual assistants (VAs) yet?

A big deal in productivity circles and among entrepreneurs about a decade ago (think Tim Ferris) was that you could hire assistants for cheap from low-wage countries. They can handle admin tasks, content creation, and turning your blog post into a tweet. All sorts of things GenAI could do for you, and likely even cheaper and without hallucinating. Yet while VAs are a growing market, they haven't been adopted universally. There are some failure modes around availability, miscommunication, and trust issues. Still, comparing and contrasting these approaches to "automating" onerous tasks is instructive.

Looking at your specific use case, there might be good reasons why an AI model would be a better fit, but it's not a given. A sweet spot for the AI would be:

• A large volume of incoming requests that wouldn't be cost-effective for human assistants to handle, even from low-wage countries

• The need to be available 24/7

• Dealing with highly sensitive data

• Sufficiently narrow tasks so that hallucinations aren't an issue

• Straightforward application of specialist knowledge, such as code generation

If those conditions are met, you might be on to something. If not, you might want to do a bit more user/market research.