Enterprise AI keeps failing for a reason nobody usually schedules a conference around. The model works. The business context underneath it does not exist in a form the model can use. This is three hours built entirely on that problem, and you can register or see the full agenda here. It was announced as Context/26 and now carries the name of the thing it is about.
The problem is not academic. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence (2025), 42% of companies scrapped most of their AI initiatives in 2025, up from 17% the year before. So the agenda asks one question the industry has not settled: what does it actually take to give AI systems the business context they are missing? Eight sessions work through it, and the day closes by trying to write down an answer the room will sign.
- A virtual, three-hour community conference on AI context, hosted by Atlan
- Separate from Atlan Activate, which is Atlan’s product and customer conference
- Eight sessions, from the business case for context to a closing Context Contract
- Built for AI leaders, CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, and enterprise architects
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| What it is | A virtual community conference on AI context, hosted by Atlan |
| When | October 28, 2026, 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM ET |
| Format | Eight sessions: keynotes, debates, a decision room, an architecture deep dive |
| Previously called | Context/26, renamed to the Context Conference |
| Not to be confused with | Atlan Activate, Atlan’s separate product and customer conference |
| Who it is for | AI leaders, CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, enterprise architects |
Why does the Context Conference exist?
Permalink to “Why does the Context Conference exist?”Model quality stopped being the constraint on enterprise AI a while ago. Frontier models write production code, pass graduate exams, and power consumer products millions of people already trust with real work. What breaks is what happens next, inside one specific company, when the model has to act on that company’s own knowledge instead of the open internet’s.
The numbers say so. S&P Global Market Intelligence (2025) found the share of companies scrapping most of their AI initiatives before production rose to 42% in 2025 from 17% a year earlier, across a survey of more than 1,000 enterprises in North America and Europe. MIT NANDA’s “The GenAI Divide” (2025) put roughly 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots at no measurable profit-and-loss return. That second report is preliminary and has been criticized over its measurement window, so treat the exact figure as directional.
Neither number describes a model problem. Both describe a context problem: the model has no reliable way to know how a business works, what its terms mean, or what has already been decided.
In practice that gap is very concrete. An agent asked about churn cannot tell which of four revenue tables is the certified one, which customers the business counts as active, or that the definition changed last quarter. Closing it is why teams now build a context graph or an enterprise context layer, and why the question of who owns that layer keeps arriving on a CIO’s desk unresolved.
Atlan calls the answer to this contextual intelligence. The conference exists because the people solving it are solving it alone, in parallel, without a shared vocabulary, and repeating each other’s dead ends.
How is the Context Conference different from Atlan Activate?
Permalink to “How is the Context Conference different from Atlan Activate?”Atlan already runs Activate, its product and customer conference. The Context Conference is not a rebrand of it or a second edition. They do different jobs.
| Context Conference | Atlan Activate | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Community conference on AI context as an emerging discipline | Product and customer conference |
| Focus | Industry-wide vocabulary, ownership, and production patterns | Product announcements and customer stories |
| Sponsored content | None, by design | Product-focused, as you would expect from a vendor event |
| Audience | Anyone building or thinking seriously about AI context | Primarily existing customers and prospects |
The distinction is the point. The Context Conference is deliberately not the place to hear Atlan’s roadmap. Sessions are debates, roundtables, and open architecture walkthroughs rather than a keynote-and-breakout format. If you want the product news, read the enterprise AI questions Activate 2026 surfaced. If you want the industry’s current best thinking on context, this is the one.
A simpler way to choose: Activate answers what the vendor is shipping. The Context Conference answers what the industry has not agreed on yet. If your open question is how to implement an enterprise context layer, or why agents need one at all, rather than which Atlan feature covers it, this is the event to block out.
What is on the Context Conference agenda?
Permalink to “What is on the Context Conference agenda?”Eight sessions in three hours. The running order moves deliberately from why context is worth funding, through what one real architecture looks like, into what the market actually sells, and ends by writing something down.
| Time (ET) | Session | Who |
|---|---|---|
| 11:00 AM | Opening keynote: Enterprise AI is missing a context layer | Prukalpa Sankar, Atlan |
| 11:20 AM | Executive decision room: Why invest in context? | Cindy Hoots, Leigh-Ann Russell |
| 11:50 AM | Architecture deep dive: Inside Verizon’s context architecture | Verizon data and AI leadership |
| 12:20 PM | Field report: What 200 CIO conversations taught me after context graphs went viral | Jaya Gupta |
| 12:35 PM | Ecosystem debate: WTF is the context layer, really? | Cross-industry panel |
| 1:05 PM | Deep dive: The market map of context platforms | Lonne Jaffe |
| 1:25 PM | Ecosystem debate: Will open context interchange ever be real? | Bob Muglia, Josh Klahr |
| 1:50 PM | Closing keynote: The Context Contract | Prukalpa Sankar, Atlan |
Three throughlines are worth calling out before you pick sessions.
The vocabulary problem gets its own debate. The industry currently files half a dozen different things under the word context: context platforms, semantic layers, ontologies, knowledge graphs, memory systems, agent runtimes. The 12:35 PM session puts people from each of those camps in one room to settle it. If you have ever tried to explain internally how a semantic layer differs from a knowledge graph, or where an ontology sits between them, that is the session.
One architecture gets opened up. The 11:50 AM deep dive walks through Verizon’s context architecture, including the decisions that did not work. Reference architectures are the thing most conferences promise and then replace with a slide of logos.
The day ends with a contract, not a summary. The closing keynote presents a Context Contract built by the ecosystem, for the ecosystem. That is an unusual thing to attempt in a first year, and it is the clearest signal of what the event is for: leaving with a shared definition rather than eight interesting talks.
The AI Context Gap
Registrants get early access to MIT Technology Review Insights' first independent study of the AI context gap, with survey findings and perspectives from leaders at Verizon and Workday.
Register for early accessWho is speaking at the Context Conference?
Permalink to “Who is speaking at the Context Conference?”The speaker list is built around three kinds of credibility: practitioners who have run this in production, investors who see the whole market, and the people who named the primitives. Atlan is adding speakers weekly, so the list below is what is confirmed rather than final.
| Speaker | Why they are on the agenda |
|---|---|
| Prukalpa Sankar | Atlan co-founder. Opens the day and closes it with the Context Contract |
| Cindy Hoots | Former Chief Digital Officer and CIO at AstraZeneca. Funded context work at scale |
| Leigh-Ann Russell | CIO and Global Head of Engineering at BNY. Runs AI in a regulated institution |
| Jaya Gupta | Foundation Capital. Wrote the context graphs essay that put the term in circulation |
| Lonne Jaffe | Insight Partners. Maps the context platform market from the investor’s seat |
| Bob Muglia | Coined “open context interchange” at Atlan’s Great Data Debate |
| Josh Klahr | Behind Apache Ossie, one of the open efforts to make context portable |
| Prajakta Damle | Working on Open Knowledge Format |
The two enterprise CIOs matter most if you are trying to get context funded. Cindy Hoots and Leigh-Ann Russell are in the 11:20 AM executive decision room specifically to answer where the money went and what it returned, which is a different conversation from what the technology can do.
Who should attend the Context Conference?
Permalink to “Who should attend the Context Conference?”This is a leadership agenda. It assumes you have already tried to put AI into production and hit the context wall, so nothing on the schedule stops to define an LLM.
| Role | What you get from the day |
|---|---|
| AI leaders | A market map of context platforms, and a defensible internal definition to standardize on |
| CIOs, CTOs, CDOs | Two peer CIOs on the funding case, plus the ownership question argued in public |
| Enterprise architects | One real production architecture in detail, and the open interchange debate |
| Data and platform leaders | Where the context layer sits against the semantic layer and catalog you already run |
Worth doing before the day: write down your own one-line definition of a context layer and bring it. The 12:35 PM debate is far more useful if you already know which camp you have been arguing from, and whether you treat a context graph and an ontology as the same decision or two.
If you are earlier than that, the context layer glossary and what context engineering actually is are better starting points, along with four context engineering strategies and a context engineering framework to test them against. The recordings will still be there afterwards.
Context Layer ROI Calculator
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Try the calculatorWhy Atlan is the one hosting this
Permalink to “Why Atlan is the one hosting this”Fair question to ask of any vendor-hosted event. Atlan’s answer is that it has been arguing the context case in public for long enough to have earned the room, and it gives that room away rather than filling it with product.
Atlan builds the context layer for AI: the active metadata platform that gives agents the business context they need to work with enterprise data. Its MCP Server is how agents reach that context in practice, and even there the interesting part is contested rather than settled: what MCP actually delivers to an agent, and when an MCP server beats an API, are both live arguments. That is the same territory the agenda covers, which is exactly why the format has to be strict about it. No sponsored slots. No product demos in disguise. Bob Muglia coined “open context interchange” at Atlan’s Great Data Debate, an earlier Atlan-hosted argument that also ran without a pitch, and he is back to debate whether the idea can actually work.
The other reason is coverage. Atlan is co-commissioning MIT Technology Review Insights’ first independent study of the AI context gap, and registrants see it early. Independent research on your own thesis is a slower way to make a point than a keynote, and a harder one to dismiss.
Real stories from real customers: context as a strategic asset
Permalink to “Real stories from real customers: context as a strategic asset”Two enterprises already treating context as something to own deliberately, ahead of any conference telling them to. They prove different halves of the argument. Workday’s is language: a vocabulary already agreed internally, then exposed to agents rather than rebuilt for them. Mastercard’s is scale, and the metadata lakehouse underneath it holding hundreds of millions of assets.
"Atlan captures Workday's shared language to be leveraged by AI via its MCP server. As part of Atlan's AI labs, we're co-building the semantic layer that AI needs."
Joe DosSantos, VP Enterprise Data & Analytics, Workday
"AI initiatives require more context than ever. Atlan's metadata lakehouse is configurable, intuitive, and able to scale to hundreds of millions of assets. As we're doing this, we're making life easier for data scientists and speeding up innovation."
Andrew Reiskind, Chief Data Officer, Mastercard
Register for the Context Conference
October 28, 2026, 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM ET. Virtual, and open to anyone building or thinking seriously about AI context.
Save your spotContext is becoming its own discipline, and this is where it gets named
Permalink to “Context is becoming its own discipline, and this is where it gets named”Every enterprise moving from a handful of agents to dozens hits the same wall. The model works. The business context underneath it does not exist in a form the model can use. The Context Conference does not sell a fix for that. It puts the people solving it at different companies in one room for three hours and tries to leave with a definition all of them will stand behind. Whether a first-year event can actually ratify a Context Contract is an open question. Attempting it in public, with the market map and one real architecture on the same agenda, is the most interesting thing anyone has scheduled on this problem so far.
FAQs about the Context Conference
Permalink to “FAQs about the Context Conference”1. What is the Context Conference?
Permalink to “1. What is the Context Conference?”The Context Conference is Atlan’s virtual community conference on AI context, running October 28, 2026 from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM ET. Eight sessions bring together AI leaders, CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, and enterprise architects to agree on what a context layer is, who owns it, and what it looks like once it reaches production.
2. Is the Context Conference the same as Atlan Activate?
Permalink to “2. Is the Context Conference the same as Atlan Activate?”No. The Context Conference is a separate, standalone community conference about AI context as an emerging discipline, with no sponsored slots and no product demos. Atlan Activate is Atlan’s own product and customer conference, built around Atlan’s roadmap and customer stories.
3. Was the Context Conference previously called Context/26?
Permalink to “3. Was the Context Conference previously called Context/26?”Yes. The event was announced as Context/26 and is now the Context Conference. The date, time, and format did not change: October 28, 2026, 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM ET, virtual. Older links and coverage that use the previous name refer to the same event.
4. Who is speaking at the Context Conference?
Permalink to “4. Who is speaking at the Context Conference?”Confirmed speakers include Atlan co-founder Prukalpa Sankar, Jaya Gupta of Foundation Capital, former AstraZeneca Chief Digital Officer and CIO Cindy Hoots, BNY CIO and Global Head of Engineering Leigh-Ann Russell, Lonne Jaffe of Insight Partners, Bob Muglia, Josh Klahr, and Prajakta Damle. Atlan is adding speakers weekly.
5. Who should attend the Context Conference?
Permalink to “5. Who should attend the Context Conference?”It is built for AI leaders, CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, and enterprise architects deciding how their organization handles AI context, ownership, and production architecture. The agenda assumes you have already tried to put AI into production, so it is a leadership session rather than an introduction for newcomers.
6. How do I register for the Context Conference?
Permalink to “6. How do I register for the Context Conference?”Registration is open on the event page at atlan.com/context-conference. Registrants also get early access to MIT Technology Review Insights’ first independent study on the AI context gap, which draws on survey findings and perspectives from leaders at Verizon and Workday.
Sources
Permalink to “Sources”- Atlan, “Context Conference,” event page and agenda, accessed August 2026. https://atlan.com/context-conference/
- S&P Global Market Intelligence, “Generative AI shows rapid growth but yields mixed results,” October 2025. https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insights/research/2025/10/generative-ai-shows-rapid-growth-but-yields-mixed-results
- MIT NANDA, “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025,” August 2025 (preliminary research). https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonsnyder/2025/08/26/mit-finds-95-of-genai-pilots-fail-because-companies-avoid-friction/
- Foundation Capital, “AI’s Trillion-Dollar Opportunity: Context Graphs,” Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg. https://foundationcapital.com/ideas/context-graphs-ais-trillion-dollar-opportunity
