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

Official Schedule Context

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.

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Pending transcript synthesis when an official recording or confirmed matching video is available.