Question 1

How do you recognize it?

Accepted Answer

Assistant surfaces a competitor's pricing detail while drafting a proposal for a different client, because both accounts live in one searchable memory store. New account managers get fluent answers about legacy clients they have never worked with, then repeat stale commitments in live calls. Client-side legal or procurement asks for a data residency statement and nobody can say which assistant records left the machine or the tenant. Retainer scope creep appears in assistant-drafted emails that quietly promise work the SOW never covered. Onboarding a new hire takes days of manual memory pruning instead of hours, because the assistant has no concept of which client owns which fact.

Question 2

Why does it happen?

Accepted Answer

Capture is indiscriminate: screen content, meeting transcripts, inboxes, and chat threads flow into one persistent store with no client-level partition, so retrieval returns the nearest match rather than the correct account. Agency work is multi-tenant by nature, but most personal assistant deployments are configured per person or per device, not per client engagement, so the boundary that matters commercially is never modeled. Retention and deletion are treated as IT housekeeping rather than contract terms, leaving no defensible answer when a client asks what was stored, where, and for how long. Drafting quality is judged on tone and speed while provenance is ignored, so an assistant that confidently blends two accounts reads as helpful until the error reaches a client inbox.

Question 3

How do you fix it?

Accepted Answer

Run a retrieval test before the next client call: query the assistant for three facts that exist for two different accounts and confirm it separates them, then document the result. Define a per-client naming convention for projects, folders, and meeting titles so retrieval has a reliable partition signal even when the underlying store is shared. Write a one-page data handling note per client covering what the assistant captures, where it lives, and the deletion window, and attach it to the retainer agreement. Assign one person to review assistant-drafted client correspondence for the first 30 days of any new engagement, with authority to reject drafts that cite unverified context.

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