When Every Company Can Use the Same AI Models, Context Becomes a Competitive Advantage – Executive Summary
HBR, by Rohan Narayana Murty and Ravi Kumar S, published February 2026
1. Summary
"When Every Company Can Use the Same AI Models, Context Becomes a Competitive Advantage" (HBR, 2026) argues that once every firm licenses the same models, technology stops differentiating and organizational context takes over. Context is demonstrated execution: the workflows teams follow across systems, the signals they react to, the exceptions that trigger action, and the judgment calls that repeat. These rules rarely live in policy manuals but in behavior, reinforced by what gets approved, delayed, escalated or blocked. That makes context valuable, rare, hard to imitate and non-substitutable: competitors can copy processes but not years of tacit learning. Capturing that advantage requires deliberate work: instrumenting how work unfolds across systems, making the context library a runtime layer every AI system connects to, governing access and privacy, and measuring outcomes alongside usage.
2. Relevance for CIOs
For CIOs, this shifts where AI investment creates defensible value: not in model or vendor choice, but in execution knowledge the enterprise already holds and rarely captures. In practice, that means increasing this knowledge and investing in tools that show how strategy, finances, resources, portfolios and workflows connect.
3. Thoughts from Sonny Claussen (CEO Bee360) about this Article
Sonny recognizes twenty years of his own work here: making the connections between architecture decisions, portfolio priorities, financial flows and strategic intent visible and actionable. Most organizations treat these as separate disciplines, but the value sits in the connective logic between them, which is what the authors call context. Sonny’s addition is that the companies he has seen succeed do not just understand their context, they govern through it. Building that governance inside an organization, with its politics and legacy systems, is institutional knowledge no model can shortcut.