Opening keynote
Prukalpa Sankar
Join Atlan co-founder Prukalpa Sankar to kick off Context Conference with a look at why context is crucial for getting AI right and what the emerging landscape of context platforms looks like.
Context Conference — The Context Layer for AI
Oct 28, 2026 / 11:00 AM ET
The conference for teams teaching AI their business.
Join the leaders and builders defining the context layer, the missing infrastructure of the AI era.
Agenda
11:00
AM ET11:20
AM ETExecutive decision room
Cindy Hoots
Leigh-Ann Russell
Prakash Kota
Hear from business leaders implementing AI at companies like AstraZeneca, BNY Mellon, and UKG on why they invest in context, what value they see, and where it fits in their AI platforms.
11:50
AM ETArchitecture deep dive
Steven Huang
Verizon’s team are the earliest adopters of AI context platforms and the furthest along in building AI agents enterprise-wide. Walk through their architecture with the team that built it, from the first use case to the platform running today: what they built, bought, and standardized, and the decisions they’d redo.
12:10
PM ETDeep dive
Varun Banka
Organizations are struggling to evolve from AI being for personal productivity to AI driving company-wide, shared outcomes. This is because every company has thousands of skills, metrics, and business rules, and they’re all scattered - some are in laptops, some in personal git repos, or in a few agents’ codebases. This session introduces the company brain. It shows how teams can build shared context by turning tacit knowledge into skills and ontologies, and treat this context like code, with releases, versioning, relationships, and usage logs.
12:30
PM ETBuilder session + customer panel
Austin Kronz
Joe DosSantos
Piyush Bhargava
Atlan’s forward-deployed engineers have spent over a year building analytics agents with teams at Workday and DocuSign. Over that year, we’ve tested, benchmarked, and ranked everything an analytics agent needs to answer business questions correctly: governed metrics, certified queries, evals, learning loops, and more. In this session, the Atlan team is joined by Joe DosSantos, VP of Data & Analytics at Workday, and Piyush Bhargava, Senior Director of Global Data & Analytics at DocuSign, to walk through our research and learnings on what it takes to build analytics agents that the business actually trusts. We’ll also open-source the playbook our forward-deployed engineers use to build accurate, reliable, and cost-effective analytics agents.
01:10
PM ETLightning talk
Ben Hudson
Every team building agents ends up with skills and agents copied by hand across harnesses, versioned by whoever touched them last. Software solved this years ago with package managers like npm and pip: one way to publish, version and install a dependency, whichever registry holds it. This session walks through the open-source spec for context. It covers a file format for skills and agents, version pinning, and a CLI that keeps every harness on the version you chose. Anyone can run a compatible registry, host it themselves, or build it into their own product, because context that only works inside one vendor’s tool isn’t really yours.
01:20
PM ETEcosystem debate
Bob Muglia
Josh Klahr
Prajakta Damle
Dipti Borkar
Amandeep Khurana
This session brings together the voices defining open context, from Apache Ossie to Open Knowledge Format, to discuss what objects must become portable, what specs we should standardize on, and what protocols we need.
01:55
PM ETClosing keynote
Prukalpa Sankar
Join Prukalpa Sankar to close Context Conference with a ratified contract built by the ecosystem, for the ecosystem.
Meet the people defining context.
The biggest voices in AI, the deepest thinkers on context, and the leaders who’ve built it in production.
New speakers announced every week
Cindy HootsFormer Chief Digital Officer & CIO
Leigh-Ann RussellChief Information Officer & Global Head of Engineering
Amandeep KhuranaMember of Technical Staff
Steven HuangThe architect behind Verizon’s Enterprise Context Platform
Prakash KotaChief Transformation Officer
Bob MugliaCoined “open context interchange” at Atlan’s Great Data DebateFormerly
Joe DosSantosVice President, Enterprise Data & Analytics
Piyush BhargavaSr. Director, Global Data & Analytics
Prukalpa SankarCoined “context is king” before it was cool
Josh KlahrForce of nature behind Apache Ossie
Prajakta DamlePioneering Open Knowledge Format
Austin KronzField CDAO & Host of WTF is the Context Layer
Varun BankaCo-founder & Co-CEO
Dipti BorkarVice President, Microsoft IQ & OneLake
Get early access to
the latest research from
MIT Technology Review Insights.
Registrants get early access to the first independent study examining the AI context gap, featuring survey findings and perspectives from leaders at Verizon and Workday.
The report explores the biggest blockers to AI projects, how business meaning and governance affect AI outcomes, and who should own the knowledge and rules AI depends on.
The ecosystem is convening on context.
Join the conversation.