Hi greenyoda! Thanks for the thoughtful questions - I will do my best to answer below. However the punchline answer to your main question of the benefits are as follows.

The initial benefits of having a personal assistant is the ability to offload low ROI errands that you MUST do so you can focus your full energy on things you WANT to do. Although it is very simple to look through your email, schedule a meeting, pay your bills, do your taxes, this takes valuable attention and brain power from your passions or top priorities for example, spending time with your family, or coming up with a new idea for a side gig. Imagine trying to work on a new project or starting to work out but having a bunch of small roadblocks before it -- human will power is limited and drained. Thus, if you have an affordable personal assistant, you can enhance your life by minimizing the roadblocks to focus on your highest priorities. It takes 21 minutes to recover your attention from a distraction. Our goal is to reduce these distractions so you can have large blocks of time to focus.

From your questions, it seems like that main issue for you may be that you believe you can do the job faster than the assistant. While this may be true at first, investing some time to train the assistant will automate that part of your life so you never have to focus on it again. Some answers below for your bullets:

-True they cannot pick up items, and it may be harder to explain to someone what you want to order at FIRST. However, the beauty of having a dedicated assistant is someone that gradually understands your preferences and will be able to order similar things in the past or recommend things to you in the future. Think Donna from Suits - she is able to give Harvey great suggestions on presents, restaurants etc. while Harvey focuses on what he does best, being a lawyer because she knows him well.

-Totally understand the security issues. What we have done is either 1. given them an employee credit card (all charges need to be quickly approved by you) or 2. given them access to a password manager that you have full access to (you enter in the pw and the assistant can only access sites that you grant access to without ever knowing your passwords)

-While it is true they do not know how to do your job, that's where training comes in! As our assistants are dedicated and expect to work many years with you, it pays to put in a bit of investment to train them on how to work with you. After the initial investment of explaining, your assistant will pay off multiple folds as you will have automated a section of your job. Think of it as taking a bit of time building a system to automate your life.

Some tasks that clients have used our assistants are as follows:
-Scheduling with clients
-Managing their inbox and summarizing important emails for it takes 1 min to check inbox instead of 30 minutes
-Populating spreadsheets of information for real estate investments
-Researching best way to utilize Chase and AMEX points for first class tickets to Japan and back
-Booking / scheduling travel through Europe
-Managing a client's eccommerce instagram to grow followers
-Quickbooks / tax document preparation for tax season
-Answering emails on behalf of client
-Answering phones and telemarketing for leads
-Creating templates of preferences (i.e. airline preference, seat preference, budget, logins)
-Calling landlord to get back deposit
-Screening and managing tenants
-Managing other assistants

And many more!

Let me know if answers your questions :)