I don't understand why nobody talks about it more for VA work. I was spending so much time doing research for my client by going through multiple websites and copy pasting information. Someone told me to try Perplexity, and it literally pulls everything together with sources in one place. Is this actually reliable enough to use for real client research, or is it just good for quick lookups?

One of my clients used to send random voice notes all day and it was honestly killing my focus. I finally suggested using a shared task board + one daily check-in instead. It’s been 2 weeks and communication is SO much cleaner now. Took me a while to realize being a VA isn’t just “doing tasks.” Sometimes we actually have to improve the client’s systems too.

I'd always just assumed ChatGPT was the default and never really questioned it but someone in this community mentioned Gemini last week so I finally gave it a go. for a couple of tasks it actually felt more natural to use especially when I was working with a Google Doc directly, the integration made everything so much smoother. that said I'm not ready to switch completely because I'm still figuring out where each one is actually better. is anyone using Gemini regularly for VA work? would love to know which tasks you find it better for because I want to keep testing rather than just defaulting to what I know.

A client asked me to “make the weekly reports faster” and instead of manually doing everything, I used ChatGPT + a simple Google Sheets automation to cut the process from almost 2 hours to like 25 mins. Not fully automated yet but honestly felt good seeing the client notice the improvement without me even mentioning it first.

Not full developer-level stuff, but things like Zapier, Notion automations, Airtable workflows, etc. I had two discovery calls this week where they casually asked “you can automate that right?” 😭 Feels like the baseline skill set is shifting fast.