Context engineering for business AI agents

Context engineering is the work of selecting and organizing the information an AI system receives for a particular decision. For business agents, that means choosing relevant records, current policies and clear instructions without loading everything the company has ever written.

Start from the decision

Imagine preparing a renewal email. The agent needs the current contract, the account owner's notes and the approved renewal terms. It probably does not need every support conversation or the entire marketing archive. Extra material creates more chances to confuse an old promise with a current commitment.

Write the decision first: prepare a renewal draft for this account, using these approved terms. Then list the sources needed to support it. This reverses the common habit of connecting a large drive and hoping the agent finds the right facts.

Build a context packet

• Task: the requested result and permitted actions.
• Identity: the account and record IDs that establish who the task concerns.
• Evidence: the relevant source excerpts, links and versions.
• Constraints: approval boundaries and any information that must be excluded.
• Gaps: unresolved questions the agent must not fill by guessing.

Keep provenance attached to important facts. A sentence such as the customer prefers monthly billing should point to a current agreement or an attributable note, not float in memory without an origin.

Test relevance and omissions

Create a representative task with one distracting document and one missing fact. Check whether the system selects the authoritative source and flags the omission. Review both the answer and the context supplied to the model. An incorrect answer may come from retrieval rather than reasoning.

Remove information only after checking that the task still works. Compact context should be sufficient, not merely short.

Make context an owned process

Assign responsibility for each source and define when it expires or needs review. A good context packet is a maintained business interface. When a policy changes, its consumers should know which version is active before the next customer-facing action.

Be Human editorial guidance. Examples are illustrative unless explicitly attributed. Sources provide background; implementation choices depend on your workflow.