Retrieval Latency Tax

Retrieval Latency Tax is the compounding cost of every minute an agency team member spends hunting for an answer that already exists somewhere in the business. It is not the cost of writing documentation; it is the cost of failing to find it. A retainer team of eight losing 25 minutes per person per day to search and re-confirmation burns roughly 17 hours a week, which at a $150 blended rate is about $2,550 of unrecovered delivery capacity. The tax compounds because the same question gets answered from scratch in three different client contexts. Tettra's Slack-native bot and Slab's Unified Search both attack the tax by pulling answers from connected tools rather than requiring a separate destination. The framework matters because agencies usually measure KM by content volume, not by time-to-answer, and volume is the wrong denominator.