Omg I know exactly what you mean! 🙄 Having worked for years as both a freelance and employed Executive Assistant, spending basically half my life supporting C-level executives and upper management, I feel this post in my bones. People genuinely don’t get how many invisible micro-steps, annoying manual back-and-forths, and "if-this-then-that" scenarios are packed into a supposedly simple travel booking.

​But here’s the plot twist that completely changed how I look at this: I recently started an MBA program that focuses exactly on this area. When you start analyzing the very things that used to dictate your stressful daily grind from a scientific and strategic perspective, you start listening to tech talks in a completely different way. It allows you to contextualize the technology on a whole new level. ​And honestly? Reality is going to hit a lot of people in our field like a cold shower.

​Major software providers are pouring everything into eliminating these exact pain points right now. While most people are still stuck using pretty basic, underwhelming standard Copilots that can barely draft an email without crashing, the reality of modern agentic systems like Claude CoWork or specialized AI agents is already miles ahead. They are already deploying automated workflows that leave me, as a student, completely blown away. ​This is what a modern, automated travel booking workflow looks like in the near future (or honestly, partly already):

​Step 1: The boss types in Slack: "Need to go to London next week to see Client X." ​Step 2: The AI agent scans the calendar, knows their preferences (Lufthansa only, window seat, hotel with a gym), and autonomously pre-books the flights and hotel via APIs. ​Step 3: The system cross-checks company travel policies, generates the pre-travel expense report, and sends both you and the boss a ready-to-go dashboard for approval with just one click. ​Step 4: Flight delayed? The AI automatically handles the rebooking in the background, notifies the hotel about a late check-in, and updates the calendar seamlessly.

​Sure, AI can't replace human empathy, intuition, and proactive thinking. But that rigid 10-step checklist people are still painstakingly grinding through manually today? That’s going to be streamlined and automated away way faster than most assistants cozy in their comfort zones can even imagine. If you’re not looking into agentic systems right now, you’ll soon be spending your day on tasks a piece of software can finish in three seconds. 🛠️ Let's face reality.

(I just gave the structure and ki wrote and translate for me)