When I started my career I was astounded by how superhuman some Fortune 500 executives were. It seemed they were magicians. Every time they answered an impromptu question, the response was refined. Every email they sent was worded perfectly, every decision they made based on deep market knowledge and up-to-date information. How did they do it?

Sure, they’re smart people, but they also have a secret weapon: their support staff. They have marketing teams that can pull research together in hours. They have chiefs of staff who give them carefully crafted agendas for every day, along with dossiers on everyone they are going to meet. They have sales and operations executives who ensure they have up-to-the-minute overviews of every relevant aspect of their company’s operations. These teams give Fortune 500 executives what appears to be super-human knowledge.

Fortunately for those of us who don’t have Fortune 500 budgets at our disposal, it’s getting easier and easier to build your own secret support staff. Within five years, most executives at any size company — and, indeed, most knowledge workers — will have tools that do much of the work of a CEO’s private coterie.

Insight Center Operations in a Connected World Sponsored by Accenture The technologies and processes that are transforming companies.

The reason? Machine intelligence.

“Cyborg systems,” or what I called “agents” in my survey of machine intelligence startups, will make this possible, using a blend of learning algorithms and distributed labor to perform an ever-widening range of tasks at low cost. With help from these agents, we’ll be able to look as smart as those CEOs do today.

We’ll also become more productive. Most knowledge workers spend less than half of their time doing things they’re really good at (i.e., what they’ve been hired to do). The rest is spent doing research, arranging meetings, coordinating with other people, and performing other minutia of office life.

These tasks could be done just as well by a machine intelligence service. For example, a typical knowledge worker might use:

Scheduling and calendar coordination through agents like Clara and x.ai

Keeping on schedule through proactive alerts like those delivered by Google Now, Siri, and Cortana

Organizing tools for regular meetings, mimicking a “Chief of staff” with a Slackbot that provides status information and facilitates meetings, like Howdy*, Standup Bot, Tatsu, and Geekbot

Following up after meetings, with minutes complete with highlighted keywords, offered by tools like Gridspace Sift* and Pogo*

Indexing for written notes with handwriting recognition, like in Google Docs or Evernote

Improving writing with text-analyzing tools like Textio* or IBM’s Watson Tone Analyzer.

(Asterisks indicate portfolio companies of Bloomberg Beta, where I am a partner.)

In cases where machine intelligence can’t yet suffice on its own, on-demand service providers like Uber, Lyft, Grubhub, and Blue Apron will give people the ability to order time-saving perks like private drivers and delivered lunches at a relatively low cost.

I got one taste of this when I started using Wonder*. Wonder is like having a personal researcher. They deploy a small army of experts, including trained librarians, to do small, defined research projects for me. If I want a dossier on someone I’m meeting later in the week, the lowdown on a company’s product, or a sketch of the competitive landscape for a company, I ask Wonder. For $30 to $60, Wonder saves me hours every week.

More and more products and services will fuse machine intelligence with crowd work to help users get things done. Uber is a good example: it combines on-demand drivers with algorithmic scheduling and coordination to deliver rides.

To be clear, CEO support teams aren’t going away. Top executives will continue to see benefits from dedicated, trusted support staff who can handle difficult, urgent, delicate work. But machine intelligence systems can take on elements of what these people do at a much lower cost, democratizing many of these capabilities.

Granted, there is going to be a lot of garbage before we realize the full promise of these virtual support armies. Just look at the profusion of chatbots coming on the market today. Some work very well for simple tasks. But many of them fail to live up to even basic promises, like this weather bot that has trouble telling you about the weather.

Not every machine intelligence application will work; others will prove to be merely novelties. But if you can filter through the many new offerings to find valuable tools, your work will improve and you may even start to look like those CEOs with the seemingly superhuman abilities that I admired when I was starting out.