上下文时代 彼得·德鲁克（Peter Drucker）——管理与商业领域最重要的思想家之一（也是“知识工作者”一词的提出者）——在 1990 年代就指出：“知识已经成为关键的经济资源，并且是占主导地位、甚至可能是唯一的竞争优势来源。”他对 AI 时代的预判，几乎精准到不可思议。 随着 AI 进步持续不减，AI 模型将越来越能够增强或自动化各种知识工作者的任务。正如我们在编程领域看到的那样，这些模型将演化为 AI 代理：在几乎所有工作领域中，成为专家级律师、医疗专业人士、商业战略家、科学研究者等。 但默认情况下，这些模型并不了解你的具体团队或组织。它们可能瞬间被要求为 福特审查法律合同，下一秒又为 高盛编写新软件代码。它们是完全通用的超级智能系统，可以为任何提出请求的人执行任何任务。其结果是：你的公司与另一家公司拿到的是同一个“专家律师”、同一个“工程师”。 因此，我们必须面对的问题是：在人人都能获得同等智能的世界里，公司如何实现差异化？ 当然，差异化的一部分来自团队和员工如何高效使用 AI 代理；但真正的终极放大器将是代理所获得的上下文（context）。这些上下文包括：要打造的正确产品、服务客户的方式、要进入的市场、客户互动的具体细节、组织内部的“部落知识”，以及随着时间积累、授权或并购而形成的、只属于你公司的大量专有信息。 过去一年，“上下文工程（context engineering）”为解决这一问题而迅速发展，但它并不容易。想象一下：一个默认对你组织一无所知的专家律师或工程师，你却只有一份文档的空间来向他说明其全部工作内容、可使用的系统、所需数据、目标等等。把正确的信息交到代理手中，成为提升生产力的关键前提。 事实上，这个问题在 AI 代理出现之前就困扰着企业。公司一直是各种上下文的集合体，试图从中榨取最大价值：流程、知识产权、独特想法与路线图、决策方式、客户信息等等。然而，随着规模扩大，企业只能利用其中很小一部分知识（无论是否已数字化）。惠普（HP） 90 年代的 CEO 卢·普拉特（Lew Platt） 曾说：“如果 HP 知道 HP 所知道的一切，我们的生产力将提升三倍。” AI 代理终于让这一愿景成为可能。我们第一次能够真正动用沉睡在组织内部的知识与信息。Atlassian 的 迈克·坎农-布鲁克斯（Mike Cannon-Brookes） 将其形容为一种“数据的梅特卡夫定律”：就像网络效应一样，数据越多，整体系统越强。 这意味着，在 21 世纪，最关键的竞争优势之一，将是企业捕获、管理并围绕正确上下文构建流程的能力。 拥有更好市场定价与租金洞察的房地产公司会赢得更多客户；能利用海量数据开发新药的制药公司会创造更多收入；能产出更好营销活动的代理机构会更具差异化。 然而，把正确的数据（上下文）交给代理，在规模化时是个难题。正如 Foundation Capital 的 贾娅·古普塔（Jaya Gupta） 和 阿舒·加格（Ashu Garg） 在其关于上下文图谱的犀利文章中所指出的那样，许多 AI 代理所需的关键决策轨迹，并不存在于任何现有软件中。而这只是代理所需上下文的一种：它们还需要客户数据、企业文档、对话历史、项目时间线、研究数据、营销素材、财务记录、代码库、HR 信息等等。 因此，设计系统以让代理访问这些数据，并确保所有代理能在这些数据上互操作，至关重要。在一些情况下，现有的系统将成为这些数据与代理的合理“归宿”；而在另一些情况下——尤其是当今天还不存在相应软件时——我们将需要全新的工具。即便如此，未来十年里，数据访问控制与权限冲突、治理与合规、以及连接分散的企业系统，都将是持续的工作。 此外，企业还必须推进大量变革管理。我们曾以为 AI 会适应我们的工作方式，但事实证明，鉴于其强大的能力与内在限制，我们反而需要去适应 AI 的工作方式。这意味着必须优化组织与工作流，以便为代理提供成功所需的上下文。其核心原则是：用户现在要负责指挥和引导代理的工作，并确保在过程中提供正确的上下文。 本质上，当下的个人贡献者，将在未来成为“代理的管理者”。他们的新职责包括：监督与升级路径、跨代理的协调，以及在不同代理之间“护送”工作——就像前 AI 时代的团队管理者一样。 总体趋势已经十分清晰：我们正进入“上下文时代”。 能够积累并最好地利用上下文的团队与公司，将实现最高的生产力与产出；做不到的，将越来越难以具有竞争力地服务客户。正如彼得·德鲁克当年所预言的那样。 The Era of Context Peter Drucker, one of the most important thinkers on management and business (and coiner of the term knowledge worker), in the 90s said, "knowledge has become the key economic resource and the dominant-and perhaps even the only-source of competitive advantage." He couldn’t have predicted the AI era more accurately. As AI progress continues unabated, AI models will get more and more capable of augmenting or automating a variety of knowledge worker tasks. Just as we've seen in coding, these models will morph into AI agents that are expert lawyers, healthcare professionals, business strategists, scientific researchers, or other roles in almost every domain of work. But these models, by default, don't know anything about your particular team or organization. In an instant, they might be asked to review a legal contract for Ford, and then in the next second be writing code for a new piece of software at Goldman Sachs. They are fully general-purpose superintelligence systems that can take on any task for anyone that’s asking. As a consequence, that means that your company is getting the same expert lawyer as another company, the same engineer, and so on. The question that we will have to wrestle with is, in a world where everyone has access to the same intelligence, how does a company differentiate? Certainly it will be about how teams and employees use AI agents effectively, but the ultimate force-multiplier will be the context that the agents get. Context about the right products to build, the ways to serve customers, the markets to go after, the specific details of client interactions, the tribal knowledge in an organization, and endless amounts of other proprietary information to your company that's developed over time, licensed, or acquired. Context engineering has blown up over the past year to tackle just this, and it's not an easy problem. Just imagine taking an expert lawyer or engineer that by default knows absolutely nothing about your organization, and you only have a single document’s worth of space to describes their entire job, every system they have to leverage, all the data that they are supposed to work with for that particular task, what their objectives are, and so on. Getting the right information to them becomes a critically important requirement to drive their productivity. Now, this problem has already plagued companies well before agents existed. Companies have always been a collection of various forms of context that they try and extract the most value out of: their processes, intellectual property, unique ideas and roadmap, ways they makes decisions, information about their customers, and so on. And companies, as they scale, have only been able to utilize a small portion of this knowledge (digitized or not). Lew Platt, the CEO of HP in the 90s, once said, “if HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.” AI Agents finally make this vision possible. We can, for the first time, begin to tap into this wealth of knowledge and information sitting inside of our organizations. Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian once framed this as a sort of a Metcalfe's law of data. Like the original theory on network effects, the more data you have, the more powerful the overall system becomes. This means that in the 21st century, one of the most critical forms of competitive advantage will be a company's ability to capture, manage, and build processes around the right context. The real estate firm that has better insights on market pricing and rent dynamics will get more clients, the pharmaceutical company that can develop and design new drugs using reams of data will generate more revenue, the marketing agency that can generate better campaigns will differentiate more. Now, getting the right data (or context) to agents is a hard problem at scale. As Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg at Foundation Capital pointed out in their provocative essay on context graphs, many of the critical decision traces for AI agents to operate with either aren't in any existing software today. And this is just one example of the kind of context that agents will need to operate on. They’ll need customer data, enterprise documents, conversation history, project timelines, research data, marketing assets, financial records, codebases, HR information, and much more. Designing our systems to get agents access to that data, and ensuring that all of our agents can interoperate on that data is going to be incredibly important. In some cases existing systems of record will become the logical houses for that data and the corresponding agents; and in other cases -especially where there is no such software today- we will need all new tools, just as Jaya and Ashu laid out. Even then, managing the myriad conflicts that emerge in data access controls and permissions so agents don’t leak data, governance and compliance challenges around what things an agent can execute on, and connecting our disparate enterprise systems to make this work is going to be an ongoing work for the next decade. Further, companies will have to drive a substantial amount of change management to make this all work. We imagined that AI systems would adapt to how we work, but it turns out due to their extreme power (and inherent limitations) we will instead adapt to how they work. This means we will have to optimize our organizations and workflows to best enable context for agents to be successful. The core tenant of this change is that the user is responsible now for directing and guiding agents on how to do their work, ensuring it gets the right context along the way. In essence, the individual contributor of today becomes the manager of agents in the future. Their new responsibilities will be providing the oversight and escalation paths, a meaningful amount of coordination throughout the work that the agents are doing, and shepherding work between the various agents - just like managers of teams in the pre-AI era. The overall trend is clear, and we are entering the era of context. The teams and companies that can accumulate and best utilize context will drive the greatest productivity and highest output. Those that don’t will find it harder and harder to serve customers competitively. Just as Peter Drucker predicted.