Nobody in Your Company Owns the Context

I do some consulting as a fractional CMO. I sat in a room with company executives this past spring and asked what I thought was an easy question. Why did we lose a key account in March.

The CRM said price. The rep who ran the deal said it was not price at all, it was an implementation date we could not commit to, and he had told two people that at the time. Service knew the account had opened two escalations in January that never reached anyone in sales. Finance knew the discount had already been pushed to the floor, so the price story could not have been true anyway. Every piece of the real answer was in that room, in four heads and three systems, and it took forty minutes and a whiteboard to assemble.

Then I asked the question that actually mattered. Who owns the CRM. IT, instantly. Who owns the sales process. The VP of Sales, instantly. Who owns the AI rollout. A director raised his hand. Who owns what the company knows about the account.

Nobody said anything, because the honest answer was nobody.

That silence is the most expensive thing in most organizations right now, and it does not appear on any org chart, any budget, or any AI roadmap.

Every Other Asset Has an Owner

Walk through your company and you can name the owner of almost everything. Somebody owns the servers. Somebody owns the brand. Somebody owns cash, receivables, inventory, compliance, the product roadmap, the hiring plan. When a thing matters, it gets a name attached to it, and that name is why the thing gets maintained.

Your context has no such name. By context I mean the accumulated, usable understanding of how your business actually works: which customers tolerate a partial shipment, why you walked away from a deal in 2024, what your pricing logic really is once the exceptions are counted. It exists, it is arguably your most valuable operating asset, and it is currently distributed across a CRM nobody trusts, an ERP nobody enjoys, four Slack channels, a shared drive, and the memories of eleven people, with no one accountable for whether any of it is complete, current, or reachable.

That is not a tooling failure. It is an ownership failure, and the two produce very different fixes. A tooling failure gets solved by buying something. An ownership failure just keeps regenerating underneath whatever you buy.

The Unowned Middle Is Where the Value Leaks

The numbers on AI value have gotten strange in a way that points straight at this gap.

McKinsey's 2026 State of AI survey found that 80% of respondents say AI has improved their individual productivity and about half say it helps them make better decisions. Individually, it is working. But only 37% report that AI has contributed to their organization's EBIT, essentially unchanged from a year earlier, even as the share of organizations scaling AI across the enterprise rose from 38% to 44%. More deployment, same financial result. The gains are landing on people and evaporating before they reach the company.

Gartner's research lands on the same seam from the other side. In April, Gartner reported that organizations with successful AI initiatives invest up to four times more, as a percentage of revenue, in foundational areas such as data quality, governance and change management, compared with the ones getting poor outcomes. The same survey found that only 39% of technology leaders are confident their current AI investments will have a positive impact on financial performance.

Read those together and the picture is not ambiguous. The difference between the companies getting returns and the companies getting productivity anecdotes is not model choice. It is whether somebody did the unglamorous work of making the company's own knowledge trustworthy and reachable.

Gartner Just Called Context Critical Infrastructure

The most striking part of that April release was not a statistic. It was a framing.

Gartner's Rita Sallam described the mandate for data and analytics leaders through 2030 as delivering "trusted data, context foundations and perceptive intelligence," and put it plainly: success is not about better models, it is about giving agents governed, contextual access to the right data. The release says context capabilities act as the brain for AI, and that leaders should redesign their architecture to make the context layer that brain. Organizations with the highest maturity in these capabilities, Gartner found, achieve up to 65% greater business outcomes.

I have been making a version of this argument since Context Is the Whole Game, and it is strange to watch a research firm start using the word infrastructure for it. But infrastructure is exactly right, and it is what makes the ownership problem urgent rather than philosophical. Nobody leaves a power grid unowned. Nobody runs a warehouse where no one is responsible for knowing what is in it. The moment you call something infrastructure, the absence of an owner stops being an oversight.

What Ownership Actually Looks Like

This does not require a new executive hire, and for most companies under a few hundred people it should not be one.

It requires naming a person and giving them a narrow remit: one owner accountable for whether the company's operating knowledge is captured, current, structured, and reachable by whatever systems and people need it. Three concrete things sit under that. What gets written down and where it lives. Who corrects it when it is wrong. And whether it can leave the tool it currently sits in, because knowledge that exists only as tuning inside a vendor's product is not an asset you own. That last test is the one most companies fail without realizing it, and it is why a context layer has to be something a business builds and keeps for itself.

The practical starting move is smaller, and you can do it this month. Pick the five questions your business answers badly and repeatedly. Why did we lose that one. What does this customer actually need. Is this job worth bidding. What did we learn the last time we tried this. For each, write down where the real answer lives today and who would be responsible if it were wrong. Most companies find that three of the five have no owner at all, and that the same two departments keep appearing in the gaps. That is your map.

The mistake to avoid is handing this to IT because it sounds technical. IT owns the systems the context sits in, which is a different and necessary job, but they cannot be accountable for whether the knowledge inside is right. That belongs with operations, or with whoever lives with the consequences of a wrong answer. Sales and service running on the same understanding of an account is an operating decision long before it is an integration project, which is the argument in Sales and Marketing Don't Need More Meetings, They Need the Same Brain.

The Takeaway

Your AI is not underperforming because you picked the wrong model. It is underperforming because the thing it reasons over, your own accumulated understanding of your own business, is the only significant asset in your company with no name attached to it.

Gartner is now calling that layer critical infrastructure. McKinsey's numbers show that individual gains stop cold at the organizational boundary, which is exactly where an unowned asset would stop. And every company I have watched close the gap did the same unremarkable thing first. They put a name on it.

Nobody owns your context. Until somebody does, every tool you buy will be reasoning over a body of knowledge that no one in the building is responsible for keeping true.

Tracy Thayne* is the founder of Expona, an AI-powered operational intelligence platform for B2B marketing. Read the Expona founder story or subscribe to the blog (below) for weekly insights on context, AI, and the operating model of the next decade.*