Your context layer is a repo with better branding

Prukalpa Sankar, who founded Atlan, gave a talk this week arguing that 2026 is the year of context. Her frame is that models keep getting smarter while staying stubbornly unuseful, and the missing half is context, the situated knowledge of your business. She cites one in five use cases reaching production and 56 percent of CEOs reporting zero financial benefit, then notes that in people only about 10 percent of job performance variance is explained by IQ. Your smartest teammate is rarely your best one.

A context layer, plainly, is the shared store where a company’s facts, playbooks, and norms are written down so machines can read them, instead of living in dashboards, Slack threads, and the head of the analyst who quits next week.

The talk is worth it for the failures. Her team built separate agents first and watched them drift onto their own islands: marketing changed the positioning, and the sales agent kept pitching the old one. So they built the shared store instead, roughly 300 skills and 40 agents in six months. It promptly turned into a software supply chain. Skills grew dependencies, competitive intel feeding positioning feeding the battle cards, and every time one learned something it broke the one downstream. Skills drifted. Nobody owned quality. Secrets ended up hardcoded in env files while people downloaded public skill repos.

She names the lesson herself: context needs to be managed like code. I would go further and drop the word layer. It is code. The moment your institutional knowledge becomes machine-readable it inherits everything code has always needed, which is owners, versions, review, and tests, and none of that arrives because you bought a layer. The vault’s own memory notes make the point from the safety side: a stale or poisoned store quietly steers everything downstream, so provenance and approval gates are load-bearing, not decoration.

Every company already has the prototype. It is the wiki, half of it confidently wrong, last edited by someone who left. Nobody notices, because nobody reads it. The upgrade is that now something does read it, at three in the morning, and acts on it.

Writing it down was never the hard part.