Anthropic offers £145k for London personal assistant amid AI agent boom

The substantial salary offered by Anthropic for a human assistant suggests a practical limitation of current AI capabilities, even as developers aim for increasingly autonomous digital assistants. While AI can manage routine tasks like calendars, it struggles with nuanced situations requiring judgment, discretion, and interpersonal skills, as noted by Anna Bailey of professional assistant network Pally Talk.

This dynamic indicates that the rise of AI could enhance the value of experienced human assistants. A Pally Talk survey found that 68 percent of professional assistants had made a business-critical decision without sign-off in the previous year, underscoring their role in complex problem-solving that AI currently cannot replicate.

The challenge of convincing businesses about the reliability of autonomous agents is further illustrated by Meta's reported trial of human contractors to handle calls for its AI assistant, Muse. This trial was subsequently rolled back due to internal concerns over privacy and transparency, suggesting that more complicated situations involving personal judgment and sensitive information remain harder to automate reliably.

A PwC 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer study found that roles where AI enhances human expertise are seeing twice the growth in vacancies and 42 percent faster salary increases. This suggests employers are placing greater emphasis on human skills like judgment and leadership as AI becomes more widely adopted, indicating a complementary rather than purely substitutive relationship between AI and human roles.