Whether you leave business school to become a corporate manager, a professional high performer or an entrepreneur, you will spend much of your time on tasks unrelated to your expertise. Only the most senior executives now have dedicated personal assistants and so the more mundane work of email, scheduling meetings and booking travel eats up your time.

A new generation of employees is looking for ways to reclaim that time so they can spend it finding solutions to serious problems: the work that will get them credit and help them advance. This work also develops their expertise and helps them remain valuable when artificial intelligence finally becomes clever enough to do all the most predictable tasks.

Instead of just “bring your own device” — the tech fad of the past decade that allowed people to use their personal computers, smartphones, or other devices for work purposes — these employees are bringing their own assistant. They are paying for services to be completed by either a remote assistant who is a real person in a faraway office, or an AI-based assistant, or a hybrid version of the two.