Welcome to the ‘Context Economy’: There’s a new digital currency up for grabs

Marketing to individual human beings at scale has long been a pipe dream, on the level of cold fusion or flying cars.

It’s been an impossibility, because for the first 4,500 years of marketing history, brands lacked two critical ingredients:

• Real-time insights on what individual buyers want
• The ability to create marketing collateral for those buyers in the moment

And so, people like me marketed to “personas”: a collection of demographic and psychographic traits that we hoped our buyer possessed. Danny the Developer, with his diploma from a well-regarded public university and well-worn Netflix subscription. Sarah the CEO with her 1.75 children and ~$58,500/year of disposable income.

Helpful? No, not really.

Still, we built our marketing efforts around this stuff, because what choice did we have? We loaded our websites with sub-pages targeting each key role or use-case our buyer might be trying to solve for. We segmented our email lists dozens of different ways, and “personalized” our outreach by making sure our subscribers’ first names appeared in the subject line.

But as any marketer knows, there’s a massive gap between “personalized” and “personal.”

This week, all of that changed. Our release of Agent OS finally made it possible for enterprise brands to market to individual buyers at scale, through one-to-one interactions that are wholly driven by the customer.

The “personalization” era is over. The one-size-fits-all web is officially dead and buried. And a new era has emerged, whether brands are ready for it or not.

What is the “Context Economy,” anyway?

Now that brands have the ability to collect real-time insights about their buyers and immediately present those buyers with hyper-relevant experiences and offers, the most valuable currency in business is now context.

Context is not just the “who” of our website visitors, but the “why.” It’s the full story of what each buyer is trying to solve, based on their interests, historical behavior and real-time engagement.

We define the Context Economy as a permanent shift in how brands relate to buyers, in which value is created not by what brands publish, but by how intelligently they adapt to what their customers want.

The research tells us that buyers want more personalized experiences; many are even willing to pay extra for those experiences. That’s why the future of commerce will be dominated by brands that can leverage context to immediately adapt to their customers’ needs. Those will be the winners in the Context Economy.

Without the ability to provide one-to-one experiences in the moment based on context, brands have a one-way ticket to irrelevance. They’re stuck in the old mode of “personalization,” where you had to guess what your customer was looking for, or hope your visitors would click their way to the answer.

Anyone still playing that game in the year 2025 has already lost.

The right solution to the right problem

The problem every brand has been chasing is: How do we do personalization at scale?

That's a great problem to chase, because if you can pull it off, it has a tremendous business impact. But the industry as a whole has been chasing the wrong way to solve that problem.

We've been focusing on rules-based personalization, which is based on if-then statements that humans have to create. Unfortunately, that doesn't scale. (And AI can only help so much.)

What the Context Economy demands is reasoning-based personalization, where the system infers intent based on visitor behavior and data to adapt the experience in real time.

To borrow an old phrase, context is “the new oil” — hyper-valuable when refined. Because now it’s possible to convert buyer context into an N=1 segment (meaning, an audience of one) in real time, versus spinning our wheels doing old-school segmentation. That’s the future of personalization, and the future is now.

The Context Economy is even more revolutionary when you consider that context is what gives meaning to AI. Prompt engineering is being replaced by context engineering as we finally realize that LLMs need context to reliably solve problems.

In the near future, brands will be doing everything that they can to 1) gain as much context about their digital audience as possible and 2) to gain that context in real time.

That’s critical, since context can experience latency too. Think of a brand that tries to deploy adaptive experiences based on behavior that's tracked and stored in a data warehouse. That's context, but it’s not real time, which makes it infinitely less valuable.

From content management to context management

Content management is dead. Segmentation is dead. The game has fundamentally changed and there’s no going back from here.

The ability to harness context in real-time and action it for an audience of one will separate the digital winners from the losers.

Having a unified foundation for AI agents and automations with complete understanding of brand voice and real-time customer insights means that brands can unlock truly adaptive experiences at scale, which is what customers are increasingly going to expect and demand.

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Gurdeep Dhillon is the Chief Marketing Officer at Contentstack. Connect with him on LinkedIn.