The Context Retention Curve: Why Personal Assistants Compound Agency Margin

Personal assistants shift agency economics by converting coordination overhead into a persistent, queryable memory layer that survives staff turnover and client handoffs. The leverage is not in drafting speed but in context retention: every meeting transcript, inbox thread, and screen capture indexed locally means a new account manager can answer 'what did we quote Acme?' in seconds instead of hours. Agencies that treat this as infrastructure rather than a novelty capture 5-15% of billable hours currently lost to re-discovery.