Valentina Akpan: Founder, Rellatech. Admin and technical virtual assistant for businesses and startups with teams.
Bloomberg reported this spring, and Fast Company followed in May 2026, that PwC laid off about 600 US employees in February, including executive assistants and other back-office roles. Deloitte, KPMG and EY have also eliminated non-client-facing support staff over the past year. McKinsey has done the same. EY and McKinsey have gone one step further and relocated executive assistant roles to lower-cost locations. The reporting suggests the trend is now spreading into banks and law firms.
I want to name what nobody at those firms is saying out loud: the work did not go anywhere.
What really happened inside these firms
A partner who used to have an assistant still has meetings that need to be scheduled, prep documents that need to be pulled, contacts that need to be updated in the CRM, and follow-ups that need to be sent within 24 hours or the deal cools. None of that got automated overnight, and instead it got reassigned to the partner, or to junior staff who are already billing 60 hours a week.
The predictable result is that highly paid people are doing $30 to $40 an hour work between calls, and the small stuff that keeps client relationships warm is falling through the cracks. It is a false saving where the salary line got smaller but the cost showed up somewhere less visible.
Why smaller businesses should pay attention
If the largest professional services firms in the world cannot make the work disappear, a 30-person business is not going to either. The lesson is to look at the model rather than copy the layoffs.
A senior operator on a monthly retainer covers the same inbox, calendar, meeting prep, CRM upkeep and follow-up work as a full-time seat, without the full-time cost, the benefits, the recruiting cycle, or the awkward layoff two years later when priorities change. That is the whole idea behind an executive virtual assistant retainer, and it is the model that holds up when the corporate one breaks.
What I see on my own retainers
Most of the businesses I run retainers for are not laying anyone off. They are trying to grow without adding a full-time seat that will take three months to hire and six months to train. A retainer gives them a senior person on day one, with defined hours and a clear scope, and when priorities change the retainer changes with them.
Work with Rellatech
I run monthly retainers for businesses and teams that need executive support without the full-time overhead. See how they're structured on the pricing page, or a short call is the fastest way to see whether it's a fit.
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