From tokenmaxxing to context engineering: Why enterprise AI needs better context, not bigger prompts

For a while, enterprise AI seemed to have a simple rule: if a model could process more information, it would produce better answers. As context windows expanded from thousands of tokens to millions, bigger numbers became synonymous with progress, and in response, organisations fed AI assistants entire document repositories and conversation histories. At Elastic, this shift was evident as customers moved from pilot programs into production.