Technical
Context engineering across enterprise systems
In short: Context engineering is the practice of designing and governing the information layer agents use: unifying data from source systems through MCP, retrieval, and policy filters inside the client perimeter.
Published 2026-05-12 · Updated 2026-07-01
Why context beats prompt tricks
Production agents fail when they reason on stale, incomplete, or unauthorized context. Prompt engineering can't fix missing ERP data or wrong permission scopes.
FDEs treat context as infrastructure: connectors, schemas, refresh policies, and audit trails, not an afterthought bolted on before demo day.
MCP in the enterprise
Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes how agents reach tools and data sources. In enterprise deployments, FDEs implement MCP servers inside the client VPC: connecting CRM, ticketing, document stores, and internal APIs with consistent auth and logging.
Governance layers
- Source-of-truth mapping: which system owns which entity
- Permission-aware retrieval: agents only see what the user may access
- Freshness SLAs: when context must refresh vs. cache
- Audit logs: what context influenced each agent action