WTF Is the Context Layer? The Missing Infrastructure for Production Agents — Prukalpa Sankar

A sales agent can keep pitching outdated messaging after the marketing team changes it. Atlan's founder recounts this failure in the company's internal agents: separate systems held separate context, and the team lacked a clear view of their dependencies.

The proposed context layer gives agents shared business definitions, procedures and organizational knowledge that they can retrieve for a task. But sharing a repository creates a maintenance problem of its own. When competitive research changes positioning, the sales material that depends on it may also need updating. The talk argues for named maintainers, versioning and review of dependent material so that improvements in one agent's knowledge do not silently leave another behind. This is the company's account, not a measured productivity result.

“the problem we solve is we say AI doesn't know your business, we fix that”

Prukalpa Sankar

“Intelligence has 1,000x'd in the last decade. Just in the last 6 months, we have 2x'd on that axis.”

Prukalpa Sankar

“building an agent was really easy. Took like 5 minutes. Uh but giving it the business context that it took to actually get it to be accurate took forever.”

Prukalpa Sankar

“We realized that context kind of needs to be managed like code.”

Prukalpa Sankar

“in a world where you and your competitor have access to the same models and the same intelligence, what differentiates a company?”

Prukalpa Sankar