Nobody hires a VA for one thing. A task-by-task look at what an AI worker can take off a virtual assistant’s list today, what stays with a person, and two setups worth trying.
“Can AI replace my VA?” is the wrong unit. Nobody hires a virtual assistant for one thing. They hire them for twenty small things, and those twenty things have very little in common except that the owner didn’t want to do them.
The research points the same way. The International Labour Organization’s refined global index of occupational exposure to generative AI (May 2025), which starts from a classification of nearly 30,000 occupational tasks, found that clerical occupations still have the highest exposure of any group. The same paper concluded that because most occupations are made of tasks that still need human input, transformation of jobs is the most likely impact.
Jobs and Skills Australia reached a similar conclusion for the Australian workforce in Our Gen AI Transition (August 2025). The higher potential for automation is concentrated in routine clerical and administrative roles, and many clerical tasks that earlier waves of automation never touched could now be done in large part by generative AI. Yet 79% of Australian workers are in occupations with low or very low automation exposure, and only about 4% are in occupations with high automation exposure.
So a big share of what a VA does is in range, but the VA as a role isn’t. The useful question is which of your VA’s tasks move, and what happens to the rest.
Here is a typical small-business VA list, sorted by what an AI worker can take today and what stays with a person.
| Task | AI worker today | Stays with a person | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Turn notes or a voice memo into a proposal, report or letter | Yes - ends as a real document | Final read | It ends in a file you can check |
| Clean up, reformat or reconcile a spreadsheet | Yes | Spot-check the totals | Checkable against the source |
| Type up invoices, dockets or forms into a sheet | Yes - reads scans or photos you upload (OCR), then builds a sheet | Anything the scan got wrong | The classic clerical task the research flags |
| Research a list (suppliers, venues, leads) with sources | Yes - cited or flagged | Deciding who to call | The call is the relationship |
| Draft email replies and follow-ups | Drafts, yes | Sending, unless you’ve connected and approved it | Sending is irreversible |
| Build a weekly report or social content calendar | Yes - on a schedule | Approval before it goes out | A routine beats a reminder |
| Book meetings across other people’s diaries | Partly - drafts the options | The back-and-forth with humans | Depends on connectors you attach |
| Phone calls, reception, chasing a supplier by voice | No | Yes | There is no voice line to hand over |
| Log in to client, bank or government portals | No | Yes | Credentials and accountability stay with a person |
| Pay, order, book travel with a card | No | Yes | No checkout tool in an agent’s kit (why) |
| Read the room - “is this client about to leave?” | No | Yes | Judgement about people |
It comes down to the question we ask of any worker, which is whether there’s a file at the end of the run. The top half of the table ends in one. The bottom half ends in a conversation, a payment or a decision about a person.
Here’s the bottom half of that table in more detail.
A good VA is often the voice customers hear. Nothing here takes a call on your behalf.
A lot of VA work is access work. They sign in to your inbox, your supplier portal, your accounting software, and move things around. A worker only reaches what you’ve connected, and the sensible default is to connect less, scoped to the job. Sharing a password with a person is a trust decision you can revisit over a coffee. Wiring a system into another system deserves more thought.
Two separate questions sit under that. How Oppermind handles what you put in is set out in our privacy policy. What you’re allowed to put in, into any tool or in front of any person, is decided by your own obligations and your agreements with your clients. If your business is covered by the Privacy Act, those obligations apply whether the one reading your client data is a VA overseas or a piece of software. Our guide to what an AI worker actually does walks through them. General information only, not legal advice.
A VA who has worked with you for a year spots the invoice that looks wrong, the client who sounds annoyed, the booking on a public holiday. A worker checks what it was told to check. That’s a strength when you write good checks (see how an agent knows it’s finished) and a gap everywhere else.
“Sort out the thing with the landlord” is a human instruction. The worker needs the thing named.
On cost the numbers are lopsided, and that makes them easy to overstate.
From the first full pay period starting on or after 1 July 2026, the national minimum wage for an Australian employee is A$26.44 an hour (Fair Work Ombudsman). That’s the floor. Many employees are covered by an award with a higher rate, and an employer also pays 12% super on top (Australian Taxation Office), which takes that hour to about A$29.61 before any casual loading. Plenty of VAs work as contractors instead and set their own rates, often well above that or, offshore, below it. Whether someone is an employee or a contractor depends on the whole working relationship, not on what the arrangement is called. So treat A$26.44 as a reference point for one hour of a person’s time, not as what your VA charges. General information only, not legal, tax or employment advice.
Oppermind’s Pro plan is A$29.99 a month, and Starter is A$9.95 a month. What a worker runs comes out of the plan’s monthly usage allowance, the same as anything else you do in Oppermind.
So a month of Pro costs about the same as one hour of an employee on the minimum wage. If the worker takes more than an hour of file work off someone’s month, the plan has covered its cost. It is not an argument that the worker replaces the person, because the bottom half of the table isn’t on offer at any price. The mistake is to cancel the VA, discover nobody is answering the phone, and conclude that AI “didn’t work”.
If you’re thinking about a VA, check whether what you want gone is mostly the top half of the table, the paperwork that piles up after hours. Hand that to a worker for a month. If what’s left is mostly phone and relationship work, you now know exactly what to hire for, and you’ll probably need fewer hours.
If you have a good VA, our view is that the better setup is a person running the worker. They’ll need their own Oppermind account, because accounts are personal and your login shouldn’t be shared, and they share what the worker makes with you. Your VA stops typing up dockets and starts reviewing the sheet the worker built from them, then spends the recovered hours on the calls and follow-ups nobody had time for. It’s the same person doing more of the valuable half.
If you pay someone a few hours a month for a single recurring report or schedule, that job is a good fit for a routine. It runs on the clock, produces the file, and can be set to stop for your approval before anything leaves the business.
Take your VA’s list and ask three questions of each line.
If all three are yes, move it this week. A “no” on the first question means it stays human.
Oppermind is an all-in-one AI workspace, and the worker is part of it rather than a separate product. One prompt produces the real thing - a document, a spreadsheet, a deck, an email draft, a project schedule - and it opens in a proper editor, so you fix one wrong figure in place instead of re-running the job. The PDF editor does OCR and fills forms, which is where the “type this up” pile starts. Workers run on a schedule or a trigger, can do a dry run so you see what they’d do before they do it, and pause for your approval before a step you’ve gated sends anything or writes to a connected system. Of your accounts, they reach only the connectors you bring and attach (there are 40 templates and full MCP support). Unlimited documents, spreadsheets, decks and designs on every plan.
If your VA works in a browser, the Chrome extension puts the same assistant beside the page they have open. On Windows there’s also a desktop co-pilot (a separate install).
Plans are Free with no card, Starter A$9.95, Pro A$29.99 and Pro Plus A$59.99 a month. Try it on one real task from the top half of the table before deciding anything about the bottom half.
Whatever you’re here to make, make more of it.
A worker is only as reliable as the checks you give it. A blurry scan can produce a wrong figure that looks just as plausible as a right one, which is why the second handover question matters as much as the first.
The first month is also work. Someone has to write the brief, run the dry run and read what comes back before trusting the schedule. If nobody in the business has that hour, the worker will sit idle, and a VA who just gets on with it may still be the better arrangement.
No. It can take a lot of the work that ends in a file - documents, spreadsheets, reports, drafts, data entry from scans - but not phone calls, portal logins, payments or judgement about people. The likelier outcome is fewer VA hours, not zero.
For the file-shaped half of the job, the numbers point that way. A month of Oppermind Pro (A$29.99, within its usage allowance) costs about the same as one hour of an employee on the Australian minimum wage once super is added. For the other half there’s no comparison to make, because a worker doesn’t do it.
Yes, on their own Oppermind account. Don’t hand over your login. The VA runs the worker, approves its steps, shares the results with you and spends the saved hours on calls and follow-ups.
Connect only what a job needs, keep an approval step in front of anything that sends or pays, and read our guide to AI workers and Australian privacy obligations first. The same questions apply to a human VA with your passwords.
Statistics in this article are taken from the linked sources as published and reflect each source’s own method and period; they are not Oppermind research. Wage and superannuation figures are for 2026-27 and change each year. Oppermind prices are current as at 24 September 2026 and may change; check the pricing page before purchasing. Chrome is a trade mark of Google LLC and Windows is a trade mark of Microsoft Corporation. Oppermind is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google, Microsoft or any organisation cited in this post.
Pick one job from the top half of the table - a report, a sheet, a draft - and run it through a worker this week.