What context does a system need to reason well?

Who the person is and what they work on, which records and threads are current, how the company uses its own terms, and what was decided recently enough to still apply.

How do you tell whether a system is actually context-aware?

Give it a request a new colleague could not act on but an experienced one could. If it asks the questions a newcomer would ask, it is reading the prompt rather than the company.

Context-Aware Reasoning

Context-aware reasoning is an AI system’s ability to interpret a request using the surrounding company knowledge, rather than only the words in the prompt.

Most requests inside a company are underspecified, and deliberately so. "Send the usual follow-up to Acme" is a complete instruction to a colleague, because they know which follow-up is usual, who at Acme receives it and what happened on the last call. The same sentence is nearly meaningless to a system that has only the sentence.

Context-aware reasoning closes that gap by resolving the request against what the company knows before acting on it. The system works out which account "Acme" refers to, which thread is live, which template the team actually uses, and whether anything since the last message changes what should be sent. The difference shows up as fewer clarifying questions and fewer confidently wrong actions.

Frequently Asked Questions

No. A context window is how much text fits in one request. Context-aware reasoning is about retrieving the right context to put there, which matters more than how much room there is.