Building the Context Flywheel for AI Data Agents

Summary In this episode Prukalpa Sankar, co-founder of Atlan, talks about what it takes to build a “context flywheel” for AI agents in data-intensive organizations. She explained why model intelligence alone isn’t enough to make AI useful in production, and how real performance depends on contextual intelligence: institutional knowledge, semantic meaning, procedural know-how, and access to the right tools. She also dug into how metadata catalogs are evolving into broader context layers that serve both humans and agents, and why agentic systems are changing the economics of metadata and governance work. Prakulpa shared Atlan’s perspective on bootstrapping context f...