Your virtual assistant is already good at what they do. But pair them with ChatGPT, and the work that used to take two hours now takes twenty minutes. The output gets tighter (run final drafts through tools like the Hemingway Editor for clarity). The turnaround gets faster. And you stop paying for time spent staring at a blank screen trying to find the right words.
Using ChatGPT for virtual assistants isn’t about replacing human judgment. It’s a force multiplier. Your VA still makes the decisions, handles the context, and knows your preferences. ChatGPT handles the grunt work: first drafts, reformatting, summarizing, and structuring information so your VA can focus on what actually requires a brain.
Here are ten concrete ways your VA can put this into practice starting today, complete with ChatGPT prompts for VAs they can copy, paste, and adapt (see OpenAI’s prompt engineering guidance for better results).
1. Drafting Client and Team Emails
Writing emails from scratch is one of the biggest hidden time sinks for any VA. The thinking, the phrasing, the tone adjustments. ChatGPT can produce a solid first draft in seconds, and your VA edits it to match your voice. (If your team uses a CRM, you can also standardize messaging with saved email templates.)
Prompt example:
“Write a professional but warm email to a client named Sarah confirming our meeting on Thursday at 2 PM EST. Mention that I’ll be sharing the Q2 marketing report during the call. Keep it under 100 words.”
Your VA reviews the output, tweaks anything that sounds off, and hits send. What used to be a five-minute task becomes a one-minute task. Multiply that across 20+ emails a day and the time savings are real.
2. Summarizing Meeting Notes and Recordings
After a 45-minute Zoom call, nobody wants to spend another 30 minutes turning messy notes into something usable. Your VA can paste raw meeting notes or a transcript into ChatGPT and get a clean summary with action items pulled out. If you record async updates, tools like Loom make it easy to capture and share context quickly.
Prompt example:
“Summarize the following meeting notes into three sections: Key Decisions, Action Items (with who is responsible), and Open Questions. Keep it concise. Here are the notes: [paste notes]”
This is one of the most practical ChatGPT prompts for VAs because it turns unstructured information into something the whole team can actually use.
3. Creating Social Media Content Batches
Most VAs handling social media know the pain of coming up with fresh post ideas day after day. ChatGPT can generate a week’s worth of content drafts in one sitting, giving your VA a starting point to refine rather than a blank page to fill.
Prompt example:
“Create 5 LinkedIn post ideas for a business coach targeting small business owners. Each post should have a hook in the first line, a short body (under 150 words), and end with a question to drive engagement. Topics: hiring mistakes, delegation, time management, pricing strategy, client retention.”
Your VA then adjusts the tone, adds personal anecdotes or data you’ve shared, and schedules the posts. The AI assistant for virtual assistant workflows like this cuts content creation time by more than half.
4. Researching and Organizing Information
When you ask your VA to research a topic, they often spend the bulk of their time not finding information but organizing it. ChatGPT can structure raw research into a format that’s immediately useful.
Prompt example:
“I’m going to paste information about five project management tools. Organize this into a comparison table with columns for: Tool Name, Price, Best For, Key Features, and Drawbacks. Here’s the info: [paste research]”
Your VA gathers the raw material. ChatGPT structures it. You get a clean deliverable without paying for the formatting time.
5. Writing Standard Operating Procedures
Documenting processes is one of those tasks that always gets pushed to next week. With ChatGPT, your VA can turn a rough bullet-point description of a workflow into a polished SOP in minutes. If you store SOPs in Notion, you can also start from ready-made SOP templates.
Prompt example:
“Turn the following steps into a detailed Standard Operating Procedure for onboarding a new client. Include a purpose statement, numbered steps with sub-steps where needed, and a checklist at the end. Steps: [paste rough workflow]”
This is especially valuable for growing businesses where processes are changing fast and documentation can’t keep up. Your VA feeds in what they know, ChatGPT formats it properly, and you have a living document that new team members can actually follow.
6. Repurposing Long-Form Content
You recorded a podcast episode, wrote a blog post, or did a webinar. Now you need that content turned into five different formats. This is where ChatGPT for virtual assistants really shines, because repurposing is tedious and repetitive, which is exactly what AI handles well.
Prompt example:
“Take the following blog post and create: 1) A 280-character tweet summarizing the main point, 2) A 3-slide carousel outline for Instagram, 3) A short email newsletter intro (under 100 words) linking to the full post. Blog post: [paste content]”
Your VA reviews each piece, ensures brand voice consistency, and distributes. One piece of content becomes four without anyone writing from zero.
7. Managing and Formatting Data
VAs often deal with messy data: contact lists with inconsistent formatting, survey responses that need categorizing, or CRM exports that need cleaning up. ChatGPT can process and restructure this kind of information quickly—then your VA can paste the final result into Google Sheets for tracking and sharing.
Prompt example:
“Here’s a list of 30 contacts in different formats. Standardize them into a table with columns: First Name, Last Name, Email, Company, Phone Number. If any field is missing, leave it blank. Data: [paste list]”
As an AI assistant for virtual assistant data tasks, ChatGPT handles the repetitive reformatting while your VA focuses on verifying accuracy and updating your actual systems.
8. Preparing Agendas and Briefs
Before any meeting, someone needs to pull together the context: what was discussed last time, what’s on the table now, what decisions need to be made. Your VA can use ChatGPT to turn scattered inputs into a clean agenda or briefing document—often stored in Google Docs so the team can collaborate.
Prompt example:
“Create a meeting agenda for a 30-minute weekly check-in with my marketing team. Include the following topics: campaign performance review, upcoming content calendar, budget allocation for paid ads, and open discussion. Add suggested time allocations for each item.”
Your VA customizes based on what they know about your priorities that week. The structure is handled. The thinking stays human.
9. Handling Customer Support Drafts
If your VA manages a support inbox or help desk, ChatGPT can draft replies to common questions that your VA then personalizes and sends. This keeps response times low without sacrificing quality.
Prompt example:
“Draft a friendly customer support reply to a client who is asking about our refund policy. Our policy: full refund within 14 days, 50% refund within 30 days, no refunds after 30 days. The client purchased 20 days ago. Acknowledge their concern and explain their options clearly.”
Your VA checks that the details match the specific situation, adjusts the tone if needed, and responds. Using ChatGPT prompts for VAs in customer support means faster replies and more consistent messaging.
10. Generating Reports and Summaries
End-of-week reports, monthly recaps, project status updates. These are necessary, but nobody enjoys writing them. Your VA can feed raw data and notes into ChatGPT and get a polished report draft back.
Prompt example:
“Write a weekly project status report based on the following updates. Format it with sections for: Completed This Week, In Progress, Blocked Items, and Priorities for Next Week. Keep the tone professional but concise. Updates: [paste notes]”
Your VA reviews for accuracy, adds any context ChatGPT wouldn’t know, and sends it to your team or clients. A task that used to take 30 minutes now takes 10.
Making This Work in Practice
The key to getting value from ChatGPT for virtual assistants is building prompts into your VA’s existing workflows, not treating AI as a separate project (automation tools like Zapier can help connect repeatable steps across apps). Here’s what that looks like:
Create a shared prompt library. Every time your VA writes a prompt that works well, save it. Over time, you build a collection of tested ChatGPT prompts for VAs that anyone on your team can use. This compounds. Month one, your VA is experimenting. In month three, they have a prompt for almost every recurring task.
Set quality checkpoints. ChatGPT produces drafts, not final products. Your VA should always review, fact-check, and adjust before anything goes out (see OpenAI safety best practices for a solid baseline of human oversight and risk controls). The AI assistant for virtual assistant work is a tool, and like any tool, the results depend on who’s using it.
Start with the tasks on this list that eat the most time in your VA’s week. If email drafting takes an hour a day, start there. If content repurposing is the bottleneck, start there. You don’t need to overhaul everything at once.
The VAs who learn to work with ChatGPT effectively aren’t the ones who will be replaced by AI. They’re the ones who become twice as valuable.