Enterprise AI Desperately Needs a Lifecycle for Context
CIO, Friday, September 18th, 2026
Business definitions drift after launch, leaving AI applications answering with policies legal replaced last week.
Teams spend weeks defining metrics, documenting policies and encoding rules before an AI application launches, and then the business keeps moving: finance changes revenue recognition, sales introduces pricing, legal revises a policy.
Those changes rarely reach every application that depends on them, so a definition updated in one system stays six months old in another. The distinction the article draws is between data and context: data tells an AI what happened, context tells it how the business understands what happened.
A record showing $500,000 in annual revenue is accurate, but the application still needs to know whether that is ARR, recognized revenue, bookings or contracted value, which products count, and whether finance recently changed the definition.