Most founders have tried both. They have used AI tools to handle workload. They have also tried hiring someone to help. Neither worked the way they expected.
AI was fast but shallow. The assistant was capable but required management. What most founders discovered is that the problem was not the tools. It was the structure.
The ones who figured it out stopped asking whether to use AI or hire someone. They started asking how to use both correctly.
Why Founders Trust AI But Still Need a Human Layer
The question is not whether AI is useful, because it clearly is.
The problem is that drafting is not the same as delivering. A draft still needs someone to decide whether it should be sent, to whom, and when. A suggested meeting slot still needs someone who knows that a morning flight will leave the founder exhausted.
“AI handles the volume. Human judgment handles the quality,” says Filip Pesek, founder and CEO of DonnaPro.
That split is where most founders eventually land. Not by choosing one over the other. By structuring both so each does what it does best.
What AI Can and Cannot Do
AI can draft almost anything. It can summarise meetings, schedule appointments, and produce first-pass research in seconds. These are real time savings.
What AI cannot do is own an outcome. It cannot notice that a back-to-back day in two cities does not work. It cannot decide which of two clashing meetings matters more this week. It cannot pick up the phone, push past the first answer, and keep at it until someone explains what happened.
A construction company founder told DonnaPro about a drop in his credit score that arrived with no explanation. He contacted the credit bureau, was told only that a quarterly review had taken place, and chased twice more with no result. He gave up not because the problem was solved, but because he had no time left to spend on it.
DonnaPro also notices that before founders ask about price, they ask about security. The fear is not that AI does the job badly. It is silent failure. Something important disappears into a filter and nobody knows it was there.
With DonnaPro, the security model is built around delegated access rather than password sharing. In Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, a delegate can read, send and delete email on a founder’s behalf, but cannot change the password or access account settings. Assistants operate on the founder’s own domain email, and access can be withdrawn at any time.
Standard contracts cover GDPR, intellectual property and confidentiality. Because every assistant works from within the EU, GDPR compliance is part of how DonnaPro operates, not something clients have to chase down. Roughly a quarter of clients also ask their assistant to sign their own NDA, and the assistant can do that personally.
Security matters more than price for most founders. Not because they distrust AI. Because they understand what AI cannot protect.
The Structure That Makes Both Work
The question for founders is not AI or human. It is how to structure both so each does what it does best.
“Delegation is not a transaction. It is a skill that compounds over time,” Filip explains. “The goal is to build enough trust, context, and structure that over time they can think ahead, make decisions, and remove work from your plate without needing constant direction.”
At DonnaPro, this is built into how assistants start. Two weeks of training before client work, including the AI tools assistants use daily for notes, drafting and research. More than 2,500 pages of operational frameworks, so each assistant works from documented methods rather than improvising. Written processes for every client, built as the assistant takes work over, so the founder’s way of working is recorded rather than held in one person’s head.
The result is an assistant who treats AI as a tool for volume and keeps the judgment for themselves.
What DonnaPro Actually Does
DonnaPro is a premium executive assistant agency built exclusively for CEOs and founders. The company has spent years refining a model that combines human judgment with AI efficiency.
- More than 7 years of experience
- Executive assistants placed across 110 industries
- Assistants based in the EU, covering more than 20 countries including the EU, UK and US
- More than 70 different types of tasks that assistants can take on, from inbox management and calendar coordination to research, project follow-ups and stakeholder communication
Every assistant passes a six-stage selection process and gets trained for two weeks on AI tools before any client work begins. Clients reclaim more than 60 hours a month, and 91% stay beyond the first 60 days.
“We measure success differently than most,” Filip says. “Not by how many assistants we place, but by how much time our clients actually get back. The number we’re proud of isn’t in our marketing. It’s in the calendars of founders who wake up and finally get to work on what matters.”
The Founders Who Understood It Early
One pattern worth noting. The founders who understand AI best are the ones most likely to hire human support anyway.
One founder whose own company builds AI search tooling still hired a human assistant. Another runs on automate, delegate, eliminate and automates first. He still hired.
It’s more a recognition of its limits instead of a failure of AI.
“I do not believe in overnight breakthroughs,” Filip says. “Anyone who attributes their success to a single moment is usually simplifying the story, selling something, or lying to themselves. For us, success came from doing many things well, consistently, over a long period of time.”
AI raised the floor. The job moved up. What founders want delegated now is judgment and follow-through, not inbox management.
The founders who figured this out early made one decision. They stopped thinking about AI and human as competing options. They started thinking about how to use both.
Learn More From DonnaPro
- 12 Questions Founders Ask Before Hiring an Executive Assistant — https://donnapro.com/guides/questions-before-hiring-an-executive-assistant/
- Virtual Assistant Security, GDPR and NDAs — https://donnapro.com/guides/virtual-assistant-data-security-gdpr/
- AI vs an Executive Assistant: Will AI Replace Yours? — https://donnapro.com/guides/will-ai-replace-executive-assistants/