The Enterprise Context Layer
63 points by zachperkel 6 days ago | 15 comments

eddy162 6 days ago
Felt like this read my mind, I was shocked recently at how good Cursor (with Claude) is at answering questions given its Slack/GSuite MCP connections; and a lot faster than Glean. Also amazing to see how this can literally give better answers than some humans would.
reply
condwanaland 13 hours ago
I enjoyed reading this but felt like it missed a few of the points on why a lot of companies are indexing heavily on the context layer.

1. While AI is capable of driving massive value, chatbots are very rarely the solution

2. You need much more than this sort of text data to represent an enterprise. Timeseries, SAP (and other ERPs), and general relational data is part of building a knowledge graph, ontology, etc

3. Storing it the way this article presents makes it usable for agents, but not humans. Whereas the point of knowledge graph, ontology, etc is to create the same layer for both humans and AI to interact with

reply
nr378 6 hours ago
> 3. Storing it the way this article presents makes it usable for agents, but not humans. Whereas the point of knowledge graph, ontology, etc is to create the same layer for both humans and AI to interact with

If storing it this way makes it usable for agents, then why don't humans just use agents when they need to interact with it?

reply
condwanaland 3 hours ago
Let's say that you want to know who your largest customer is, both by order value and volume. I could either: 1. Prompt my agent and deal with writing the prompt, waiting for the agent to sift through all the data (which would be massive), and pay the token costs, all of which has to be repeated everytime I want to answer this question, OR

2. I check my ontology for the answer, probably in a dashboard, and it takes 5 seconds. I have a link I can freely share around my enterprise and I haven't spent token costs.

Whats more, when I have sent my agent out to some tasks (go find out what revenue we're leaving on the table by not selling spot contracts to our biggest customers) my ontology gives me a few bits of data to validate the agents work against. For humans and AI to work together, they need the same context layer

reply
simonjgreen 10 hours ago
Yes. This feels more like a way to produce an SMB context layer than enterprise.
reply
jordanbeiber 11 hours ago
Exactly this. Having spent almost three decades in enterprise context I see a lot of reinvention of something like a poor mans, unstructured, enterprise architecture - because AI agents.

I keep repeating ”what is good for humans in an organization is also good, or even required, for AI agents”.

Imagine every new instance of an AI agent as a new employee. With humans its ok to slowly accumulate knowledge through word of mouth, trail and error and the general inertia of larger orgs almost seem structured (or unstructured) knowledge-wise for this.

AI agents will never be useful in high value operations in a larger orgs without organizational knowledge available and reliable.

reply
vidimitrov 6 days ago
* * *
reply
scrumper 5 days ago
> that rule could still look valid in the ECL long after the original reasons for it stopped applying.

Ha, then it'd be doing a great job of internalizing institutional knowledge! Wait a few years and then put another one on top. I'm not sure how these things incorporate new knowledge over time, or handle re-orgs and strategy shifts, or adapt as new verticals are added. Do you need ever increasing numbers of agents to keep things in line?

As much as I'd love to have a perfect example of one of these running - it really would be very beneficial - I do have a vague feeling that these ECL concepts (and similar Enterprise-wide knowledge management AI panaceas) are the 21st century equivalents of trying to build comprehensive expert systems in Prolog.

This is cool though. Agents make it seem more plausible in a way that pure RAG systems don't. I am sure there is mileage in more focused cases (like at the author's startup, or departmentally.)

reply
consumer451 11 hours ago
This was great info, but as someone who is concerned about passing great info on to others about my own products, I am suddenly less worried about my posts reading like LLM-speak. This post did very well. I should probably stop overthinking it, and learn from this post about balance.
reply
chrisweekly 6 days ago
Fantastic article. I've always felt that institutional knowledge flow is one of the most essential factors in a given company's ability to survive. In the nascent age of AI, this "Enterprise Context Layer" approach seems more likely to catch on (and become table stakes, in order to keep up) than something like https://dotwork.com which looks amazing but seems to imply vendor lock-in.
reply
fittingopposite 5 days ago
Any good open source solutions for this?
reply
kingjimmy 6 days ago
"But what if I told you that all you need is 1000 lines of python + a github repo?" didnt need to read past this line LMAO. not at all enterprise.
reply
F7F7F7 5 days ago
Don't worry. Someone will come along and run the same 1000 lines on a Docker container using ECS Fargate launched with Step Functions under the watchful eyes of Cloud Watch all glued up with Lambda and stick everything behind IAM roles and a parem store and charge 100x more...then it can fit your definition.
reply
moqizhengz 13 hours ago
its not about the cost or complexity of the solution, its just about the info density.

```The result after running 20 parallel agents on this for ~2 days:```

That's basically saying 'yeah, me and my 20 coworkers figure everything out of your company'. There is just nothing innovative apart from hoping the AI to magically just work.

reply
nullpoint420 5 days ago
Even worse. The same code but deployed as a ZIP file….
reply
tomik99 5 days ago
[dead]
reply
zenon_paradox 6 days ago
[flagged]
reply