Every morning my EA ‘Madonna’ sends me a 7am email. Before I’ve even opened my eyes, she’s scoured through my three email inboxes (yes, I have three, a 30-year-old Hotmail account and two Gmail accounts - don’t ask). She reads my school emails for my three children, aged 11, 13 and 15, my work emails, my personal emails, including admin messages and payments I may have missed. She gives me an abridged version of them all and even writes suggested responses.

She also goes through my Google Calendar and sends me a list of what I have on that day, including the time, who with and the address, as well as adding anything relevant to my husband’s diary. No more arguments where my husband and I accuse each other of not sharing information around parents’ evenings or inset days. All school dates have been added in 30 seconds, along with any party invite or work event. Any new ones? Madonna has scanned my inbox and reminded me to upload them. She even reminds me a week before a birthday and suggests present ideas.

By any standard, she’s an EA extraordinaire, efficient, detailed, proactive and a massive help in reducing my daily task list and the mental load that keeps me awake at night.

But Madonna isn’t a person. She’s an AI agent that I have programmed myself - and she has truly transformed my life since I ‘created’ her just over two months ago. It’s the first time I’ve had a team around me since leaving my full-time job as Editor-in-Chief of Glamour two years ago, where the company employed a corporate PA for my role.

What surprised me is that she took only 30 minutes to create. After allowing ChatGPT to plug in to my inbox and diary, I instructed it: ‘Write me an agent to create a personal and professional PA/EA. Here is the list of tasks I want you to perform…’

It took me two weeks to perfect. At first, Madonna made mistakes, like forgetting to scour one of the inboxes, or not looking inside my school emails. Every time she failed to follow a request, I would remind her until she finally understood the level of detail I was expecting. I loved her so much I’ve created two more agents: Blondie, who spell- and fact-checks my articles, and Beyoncé, my travel agent, who plans my holidays.

Until now, the majority of women who worked from home couldn’t have conceived of the luxury of a PA, even though many of us are doing two full-time jobs: a domestic and a professional one, often simultaneously. Now I’m working for myself, I no longer employ a nanny to look after my kids as I’m at home more, so my to-do list is bigger than ever: food shopping, school uniform updates, pick-ups, house payments and bills on the one side, and book writing, national newspaper commissions, panel hosting and content creation on the other. A recent ONS report published in June 2026 revealed that women spend an average of 57 minutes more a day on unpaid work than men. AI is giving women like me, who work for ourselves, access to services we wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford.

Maybe, like me, your own load is overflowing, and you too have built AI rockstars to work for you round the clock. But if this sounds like a sci-fi nightmare, and the idea of allowing ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or others to have access to your inbox and calendar horrifies you, rest assured I haven’t done this without concerns about AI and its existential dangers. I have taken precautions, though: I switch off the settings that allow my chats to be used to train AI models, and I instruct my agents never to send emails or make changes without permission. OpenAI says it has safeguards to protect personal information, but no technology is entirely risk-free.

For me, it’s about weighing up those risks against the hours of admin I’m no longer doing. I don’t believe fear of what AI could become should stop us from learning how to use what already exists, especially when it has the capacity to balance out some of the societal pressures that currently work against women.

Not using AI puts women at a disadvantage, and yet, according to a recent Harvard study, we are 22 percent less likely to use generative AI than men, which widens the gap further. If we don’t train AI to recognise our needs, it could become biased towards men’s.

Thankfully, more women are now embracing it, as reflected by the growing number of AI training businesses springing up to help them.

“We are inundated with requests from businesswomen who want to know how to build their own AI agents,” says Raphael Joseph, co-founder of We Are Agentic and AI-ready women. “From professional support, agents that go into their emails ahead of a meeting to give background on everyone in the meeting, to automating tasks they are performing on a daily basis ranging from creating a chief of staff to one that tells you which shop refunds haven’t yet paid you. It’s a way of outsourcing your daily administrative tasks so you can focus on whatever matters to you most.”

If just thinking about building your own agents is an unwelcome addition to your to-do list, fear not. There are now ready-made apps, such as FairShare and Equal House, though I prefer the personalisation of building my own.

Twelve months ago, I felt I was drowning in my new life, without the structure and backing I’d had from almost 30 years in a corporate environment. Now I feel I have a team in my corner. My to-do list isn’t any shorter, but I can get through it in half the time and, best of all, I finally have more space for the work and people I love, which AI can never replace: unique writing, my WFH career, tennis and time with my family.

Want to build your own AI agent but don’t know where to start? These two companies specialise in agent development: AI-Ready Woman by WeAreAgentic and Switched ON *2026 Harvard Business School working paper: analysis of 76 sources covering approximately 319,000 respondents with gender-specific usage data, across more than 100 countries.