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As organizations scramble to enact agentic AI options, accessing proprietary information from all of the nooks and crannies shall be key
By now, most organizations have heard of agentic AI, that are methods that “think” by autonomously gathering instruments, information and different sources of data to return a solution. However right here’s the rub: reliability and relevance rely on delivering correct context. In most enterprises, this context is scattered throughout numerous unstructured information sources, together with paperwork, emails, enterprise apps, and buyer suggestions.
As organizations look forward to 2026, fixing this downside shall be key to accelerating agentic AI rollouts around the globe, says Ken Exner, chief product officer at Elastic.
"People are starting to realize that to do agentic AI correctly, you have to have relevant data," Exner says. "Relevance is critical in the context of agentic AI, because that AI is taking action on your behalf. When people struggle to build AI applications, I can almost guarantee you the problem is relevance.”
Agents everywhere
The struggle could be entering a make-or-break period as organizations scramble for competitive edge or to create new efficiencies. A Deloitte study predicts that by 2026, more than 60% of large enterprises will have deployed agentic AI at scale, marking a major increase from experimental phases to mainstream implementation. And researcher Gartner forecasts that by the end of 2026, 40% of all enterprise applications will incorporate task-specific agents, up from less than 5% in 2025. Adding task specialization capabilities evolves AI assistants into context-aware AI agents.
Enter context engineering
The process for getting the relevant context into agents at the right time is known as context engineering. It not only ensures that an agentic application has the data it needs to provide accurate, in-depth responses, it helps the large language model (LLM) understand what tools it needs to find and use that data, and how to call those APIs.
While there are now open-source standards such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that allow LLMs to connect to and communicate with external data, there are few platforms that let organizations build precise AI agents that use your data and combine retrieval, governance, and orchestration in one place, natively.
Elasticsearch has always been a leading platform for the core of context engineering. It recently released a new feature within Elasticsearch called Agent Builder, which simplifies the entire operational lifecycle of agents: development, configuration, execution, customization, and observability.
Agent Builder helps build MCP tools on private data using various techniques, including Elasticsearch Query Language, a piped query language for filtering, transforming, and analyzing data, or workflow modeling. Users can then take various tools and combine them with prompts and an LLM to build an agent.
Agent Builder offers a configurable, out-of-the-box conversational agent that allows you to chat with the data in the index, and it also gives users the ability to build one from scratch using various tools and prompts on top of private data.
"Knowledge is the middle of our world at Elastic. We’re attempting to just be sure you have the instruments it’s good to put that information to work," Exner explains. "The second you open up Agent Builder, you level it to an index in Elasticsearch, and you’ll start chatting with any information you join this to, any information that’s listed in Elasticsearch — or from exterior sources by way of integrations.”
Context engineering as a self-discipline
Immediate and context engineering is changing into a discipli. It’s not one thing you want a pc science diploma in, however extra courses and finest practices will emerge, as a result of there’s an artwork to it.
"We want to make it very simple to do that," Exner says. "The thing that people will have to figure out is, how do you drive automation with AI? That’s what’s going to drive productivity. The people who are focused on that will see more success."
Past that, different context engineering patterns will emerge. The business has gone from immediate engineering to retrieval-augmented era, the place info is handed to the LLM in a context window, to MCP options that assist LLMs with device choice. But it surely gained't cease there.
"Given how fast things are moving, I will guarantee that new patterns will emerge quite quickly," Exner says. "There will still be context engineering, but they’ll be new patterns for how to share data with an LLM, how to get it to be grounded in the right information. And I predict more patterns that make it possible for the LLM to understand private data that it’s not been trained on."
Agent Builder is on the market now as a tech preview. Get began with an Elastic Cloud Trial, and take a look at the documentation for Agent Builder right here.
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