AIWA "The One Thing" #01: Context Graphs, AI's Next Trillion-Dollar Opportunity?

*AI with Alec: The One Thing is my weekly newsletter where I unpack the most interesting enterprise AI development over the previous 7-10 days in 4-500 words.

Hope you dig it.

What?
AI with Alec: The One Thing #01 is about “AI’s trillion-dollar opportunity: Context Graphs” 12.22.25 by Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg. 

Why?
It’s rocketing through the AI ecosystem, especially the more technical segments and for good reason. Context Graphs introduce decision making leverage in a way that was previously impossible. Until now. 

Here’s what you need to know.

Definition:
A Context Graph captures the “why” behind business decisions by turning institutional knowledge that lives in emails, Slack threads, decks and senior leaders’ heads into searchable organizational memory that AI agents can learn from and apply, in real time. 

A permanent asset that compounds in value as your intelligent system gets smarter with every interaction.

How They’re Built + Why Transformative:
Context Graphs are built by seeing the full context as business decisions are being made. They’re transformative because instead of AI agents relying on rules (the way things are supposed to happen), they enable AI agents to see the full context of any given situation as it unfolds in real time. 

Developing an understanding of the way things actually happen and how those critical decisions are made to improve the way they operate.

These are decisions typically made after SMEs and operators consider exceptions, nuances and judgement calls, during conversations that start with “Great question. It depends because there are tradeoffs to consider”… 

Creating a Context Graph associated with every decision, action and outcome generated by an autonomous AI agent acting on its own is useful. 

Enabling the collaboration of AI agents + Humans to codify the taste and feel that enables superstars to “see around corners”, in a way that can be understood by an intelligent system, is exceptionally useful. 

The Killer Application:
Enabling a superstar’s intuition, taste and feel to be scaled across the organization. Made queryable through a semantic layer (“$1 Bet Your CEO Will Ask ‘What is Our Semantic Layer Strategy?’” 01.06.25) that translates business context into something both humans and AI agents can leverage.

As Rick Rubin has reminded us, taste is a really big deal (Newsletter #39: From Mad Libs to Alien Intelligence to Iron Man Suits: Rick Rubin, Jack Clark + Andrej Karpathy Decode AI Software 06.29.25).

The Paradigm Shift:
Context Graphs are an excellent example of how LLMs are enabling a paradigm shift in software applications, evolving from deterministic (humans tell it what to do) to probabilistic (has the ability to think and reason).

It’s one thing for a probabilistic application to be infused with rules but an entirely different thing to be supercharged by Context Graphs.

Unleashing the promise of evolving from an Application to Data to Knowledge-Centric architecture.

This isn’t about routine decision making. 

This is about complex, high value decision making where understanding the connective tissue, depth of business logic / ontology understanding is critical, precedent matters as does 2nd and 3rd order thinking to help with running simulations. 

The enterprises capturing decision traces today aren’t just improving workflows. They’re building intelligent systems and the infrastructure for autonomous operations.

This isn’t incremental improvement, it’s architectural transformation.

Creating separation that compounds daily, with every interaction.