Does the right context reach your agents at the right time?

Training depreciates. Code depreciates. Access to a frontier model takes a credit card. The lasting competitive advantage is context infrastructure: well-curated information and well-managed access to it. This is the one layer that appreciates with every model upgrade.

Agent quality depends on having the right information for the task at hand. Not everything, not nothing — the relevant context, when it’s needed. If your agents are underperforming, the model might not be the bottleneck. The context pipeline might be.

But context requires two things: well-curated information AND well-managed access. Either one without the other falls short. Rich context with missing access controls is dangerous. Perfect access controls over poorly structured information is useless.

Five areas to invest in: structure (coherent, machine-consumable), permissions (fine-grained, per-task), discovery (standards like MCP and A2A), authority (scoped to the delegating user, decreasing through chains), and freshness (up to date or at least versioned — stale information fed to an agent is worse than no information).

Go deeper: Context Infrastructure May Be Your Best Long-Term Investment makes the full strategic case for why context is the only layer that compounds.