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

In the last two years, models have gotten exponentially smarter. Two years ago they couldn't pass the bar. Today, top 1% of test scorers. And yet most agents still can't answer a simple business question correctly. You ship a demo that works. You deploy it. The business abandons it in a month.

The missing variable is context: the business definitions, procedural knowledge, and operational norms that make a human expert valuable.

Drawing on hundreds of production deployments, Prukalpa Sankar will break down what it actually takes to give agents contextual intelligence — and get them past the demo stage.

She'll walk through the architecture of a context layer: how context repos work (versioned, testable, portable), how simulation environments catch failures before deployment, how agent traces compound back into shared context, and why context engineering scales where fine-tuning and prompting don't. She'll also cover why your context needs to be open (MCP, Iceberg, deploy to any framework) — and what happens when it isn't.