AI virtual assistant for admin work
An assistant that triages the inbox, drafts replies in your voice, books meetings, chases follow-ups and sends a daily briefing, with a person approving anything that goes out.
Businesses hire virtual assistants because admin swallows the day. General virtual assistance is the most in-demand skill in the Customer Service & Admin Support category of Upwork’s In-Demand Skills 2026 report.
Email takes over a quarter of the week
The average knowledge worker spends about 28% of the workweek managing email.
McKinseyThe work is repetitive
Upwork’s own list of virtual assistant tasks: sorting email and drafting replies, coordinating calendars, handling customer inquiries, building reports, data entry and research.
UpworkHuman assistants help, but do not scale
At $10–$20 an hour, a virtual assistant works set hours, needs training, and still needs checking.
UpworkWhat the agent does
- 01
Triages the inbox
Every 30 minutes a workflow reads new emails and a triage agent labels each one: urgent, needs a reply, FYI, newsletter or spam-like. It summarises long threads in two lines.
- 02
Drafts replies in your voice
For emails that need an answer, a drafting agent writes a draft using your past replies, price list, policies and FAQs from a knowledge base.
- 03
Books meetings
When someone asks to meet, the drafting agent checks your calendar, proposes times and books the slot once they confirm.
- 04
Chases follow-ups
A scheduled workflow finds threads where you are waiting on someone, and the drafting agent writes a polite nudge after the number of days you set.
- 05
Sends a morning briefing
A briefing agent sends today’s meetings, what came in overnight and what is waiting on you, in one message.
Checked before anyone sees an answer
The guardrail
No price promises, no confidential data, and no replies on legal or HR matters. Those emails are flagged to you instead of being drafted.
Where a person steps in
Every outgoing draft lands in the Human Review inbox. You edit and approve it, and only then does the workflow send it. After two weeks of approving everything, you decide what can send automatically.
What is recorded
Monitoring shows every email handled, every draft and every cost.
The steps, in order
Agents, schedules, guardrails and the review inbox are set up on screen. Only the email and calendar connection needs a developer.
| Step | What you do in Studio | Typical time |
|---|---|---|
| 1Add your knowledge | Add your FAQs, price list and policies, and 10 of your best past replies as tone examples. | 30–60 min |
| 2Create the agents | Create the triage agent, the drafting agent and the briefing agent, each with its output fields. | 20 min |
| 3Add guardrails | Add “no price promises”, “no confidential data” and “flag legal or HR”. | 10 min |
| 4Test on real emails | Paste 20 recent emails into the Playground and save them as a test suite. | 30–45 min |
| 5Connect email and calendar | Add email and calendar tools, with your account’s API access stored in Secrets. | 2–4 hours for a developer |
| 6Build the workflows | Put the inbox sweep, the follow-up check and the morning briefing on schedules, with drafts routed to Human Review. | 1 hour |
| 7Run in review-only mode | Approve every draft yourself for the first two weeks, then decide what can send automatically. | 2 weeks |
A worked example
A team of 5 managers and founders. The inputs are assumptions about a typical business; replace them with your own numbers.
| Line | Assumption | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Email time today | 28% of a 40-hour week, which is about 11 hours per person per week | 2,640 hours across 5 people |
| Time the assistant saves | A third of that (triage, first drafts, scheduling and follow-ups), which is about 3.7 hours per person per week | ≈ 880 hours |
| Value of that time | 880 hours at $46.89 an hour, the US private-industry average cost per hour worked (Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 2026) | ≈ $41,300 |
| A human assistant, for comparison | 20 hours a week at $15 an hour, the middle of the $10–$20 range | $15,600, office hours only |
| Total value | ≈ $41,300 | |
| Krazimo Studio cost | ≈ $1,400–$1,800 a year: the Starter plan at $99 a month plus model usage, if triage runs once per sweep for all new emails (about 4,500 runs a month). About $6,500 a year on Growth at $499 a month for heavy inboxes | |
About 3.7 hours per person a week, around 880 hours a year across the five, from an assistant that works around the clock and never forgets a follow-up.
See it working
on your own information.
Tell us about your business and we will walk through this use case with you in Studio.