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Harvard Business Review
Context is Your Competitive Advantage
Every company now has access to the same AI. The ones that win will be those that know something the models don't.
by Rohan Narayana Murty and Ravi Kumar S
Reading time: ~5 min
Word count: ~870
Illustration by Mariano Pascual
Summary
We just published an article in Harvard Business Review that makes a case we believe every business leader needs to confront: in an era where everyone has access to the same AI, the real competitive advantage isn't your technology. It's your context.
Think about it. The frontier AI models are broadly available. The platforms are converging. The vendor ecosystems overlap. If you and your closest competitor are running the same tools, the same models, and the same infrastructure, what exactly is your edge?
- The advantage that compounds
Every organization has something its competitors cannot buy, copy, or download: the accumulated knowledge of how it actually operates. Not the process maps or the policy manuals, but the real thing. The way teams coordinate under pressure. The signals that trigger early intervention on a deal. The judgment calls that get made, day after day, across hundreds of decisions, shaped by years of hard-won experience about what wins in a specific market.
We call this execution context. And after studying more than 200 distinct work patterns across 50+ large enterprises, we found something striking: context explains performance differences far more powerfully than any technology investment.
200+
Work patterns studied
50+
Large enterprises analyzed
#1
Differentiator: Context
"When everyone has access to the same AI models, the same AI-enabled tools, and the same vendor ecosystem, context becomes the differentiator."
- Here's why this should worry you
AI models are general-purpose by design. They don't know which trade-offs your organization prioritizes. They can't infer how your teams coordinate under uncertainty, or what "winning" looks like in your specific operating environment. When you deploy AI without this grounding, something counterintuitive happens: the AI actually erases your competitive advantage by standardizing the very behaviors that make your organization distinctive.
This is also the hidden explanation for why so many enterprise AI pilots show early promise but never scale. They work in controlled demos, then stall when they hit real workflows. Leaders respond by tuning prompts or adding documents. But the real issue is structural: the model doesn't have your organization's operating logic. And until it does, improvements stay local and fragile.
In the full article, we show how identical deal signals can mean completely different things depending on an organization's context, and how surfacing the right context at the right moment changes the trajectory of multimillion-dollar decisions.
- We've already seen the proof
This isn't a theoretical argument. In April 2025, we published an article in HBR that documented what we believe was the first real-world case study showing how context derived from how teams actually work produces significantly better AI outcomes. Until then, this idea was largely theoretical. A Fortune 500 company had deployed an AI tool for contract drafting. Despite being powered by a leading large language model, the team's output barely changed. The breakthrough came when the company mapped the team's actual work patterns and used that context to ground the AI. Manual effort dropped by more than half. Throughput increased by nearly 30%. Same model, same tool, dramatically different outcomes. The only variable that changed was context.
This new article is a follow-up to that piece. Where the first showed how context makes AI work for a single team, this one makes the broader strategic case: context isn't just an implementation detail. It is the competitive advantage of the AI era.
- What we cover in this new article
The piece goes deep on several fronts we can only preview here:
1
The strategic case: why context passes every test of durable competitive advantage. Using a well-known strategic framework, we show that context is valuable, rare, nearly impossible to imitate, and non-substitutable, and why its impact compounds over time.
2
The proof: how two nearly identical companies diverge in ways that matter. A side-by-side look at two B2B firms, same industry, same CRM, same process stages, whose hidden patterns of execution produce very different outcomes.
3
The playbook: a four-part action plan for CXOs. We introduce context engineering, the practice of systematically capturing, encoding, and operationalizing how work actually happens, and lay out the concrete steps to build this capability before your competitors do.
If you lead an organization that's investing in AI and wondering why the returns aren't materializing the way the pilots promised, this article explains what's likely missing and what to do about it.
Read the full article in Harvard Business Review
Get the complete framework, the real-world examples, and a four-step action plan for turning your organization's context into a compounding competitive advantage.
Read the article in HBR
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