AI for Virtual Assistants: Skills, Automations, and the Human-in-the-Loop
The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.
In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with Kayla Helmick to talk about her journey from traditional virtual assistant work to leveraging AI for automations, podcast editing, and app development — and how she turned an early existential threat into the biggest boost her business has ever had.
They get specific about the practical stuff: building reusable Claude skills to process podcasts, fixing stuck Zapier and Tally form automations, and going from playing around in Lovable to building and deploying a full Laravel app with Claude Code — her first being a memorial website for a friend.
The conversation also widens out to the harder questions: keeping a human in the loop for quality, how AI is reshaping the future of virtual assistance and the work itself, and what it even means to call yourself a "virtual assistant" when you're shipping internal tools.
- Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
- Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
- Kayla’s Website - http://kaylahelmick.com
- Kayla on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/kayla.helmick/
- Kayla on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaylahelmick/
- Kayla Helmick on X - https://x.com/kayla_helmick
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Creators and Guests
Host
Matt Stauffer
CEO of Tighten, where we write Laravel and more w/some of the best devs alive. "Worst twerker ever, best Dad ever" –My daughter
