The Last Mile of Office Work Disappeared

The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO

We remember our early days at Weber Shandwick, a global PR firm where we both began our careers. We were juniors. We had to fill out timesheets. The more junior you were, the more hours went into “admin,” which was a collective term for work that was not billable to clients. The more senior you were, the less admin you had in your timesheet.

Admin could be anything from collecting data to building spreadsheets to massaging PowerPoint decks. The “ground work” we call it now. The last mile for all the work we did.

This last mile has just disappeared now.

Three announcements landed within days of each other. Microsoft launched Copilot Cowork, an AI agent that reads, analyzes, and acts on files directly on your computer. Anthropic updated Claude to maintain shared context across Excel and PowerPoint simultaneously — pull data from a spreadsheet, generate the finished presentation, in a single session. OpenAI gave ChatGPT write access to Google Docs, Sheets, Outlook, and your calendar.

Each…