The AI conversation in marketing has been dominated by two things: which tools to buy and how to write better prompts. Both are real skills. Neither one determines whether a marketing team gets genuine value from AI or just produces polished outputs that nobody trusts. What determines value is context. Specifically, who builds it, who owns it and whether the marketers closest to the business are the ones making those decisions. I’ve seen this play out many times before the term context engineering was even coined. Marketers who help define the context get measurably more from their technology, higher platform usage, faster time to market, more experiments shipped. The ones who don’t are left running campaigns on top of an information environment someone else built for them. ## From prompt engineering to context engineering The industry spent 2024 and 2025 building training programs around prompt engineering and the skill is real. A well-structured prompt produces better results than a vague one.…