The “vibe coding” phenomenon is officially outgrowing coding. Every day, I see more and more managers, marketing specialists, and copywriters discovering tools like Claude and building their own complex workflows in this ecosystem. It is fascinating to watch. But as medium and large companies try to scale this, they hit a wall. To truly empower employees to use these tools effectively, companies desperately need a common context and shared guidelines.
Looking at my primary field of expertise – marketing – I’ve realized that a new role could, and probably should, emerge from this AI chaos: the Context Owner.
The Universal Onboarding Problem
We are in a strange transitional phase. Marketing teams are producing content faster than ever, but so much of it feels hollow. Why? Because humans and AI agents actually suffer from the exact same onboarding problem: a complete lack of context.
If you hire a new PR agency or a freelance copywriter and give them fragmented, outdated PDFs, they will write generic, off-brand copy. If you give an AI a generic prompt, it will use statistical prediction to give you generic output.
Both real people and AI agents need alignment, but they consume it differently. Real humans need clear guidelines, narratives, and onboarding materials. AI agents need structured, machine-readable rules – think of files like RULES.md or llms.txt.
Currently, nobody is responsible for building and maintaining this unified truth.
“The main thing that determines whether an Agent succeeds or fails is the quality of the context you give it. Most agent failures are not model failures anymore, they are context failures.“
– Phil Schmid, Staff Engineer at Google DeepMind.
via https://www.contentstack.com/blog/ai/context-engineering-in-the-ai-era
Enter the Context Owner
The Context Owner is a new breed of marketer who sits firmly within the marketing hierarchy, likely reporting directly to the CMO. Think of them as part systems architect, part curator, and part internal journalist. Their primary goal is to maintain the active brand knowledge base so that both human creators and digital agents stay on-brief.
This role moves far beyond a traditional static “Brand Book.” A Context Owner manages a dynamic ecosystem that includes:
- Design guidelines and visual constraints.
- SEO rulebooks and tone of voice manuals.
- Approved quotes, win/loss notes, and testimonials.
- Negative constraints (what the brand should never say).
To do this, the Context Owner must act as a master interviewer. In a large enterprise, they are the project managers connecting the dots between different departments – sitting down with product managers, founders, and sales teams to extract knowledge. In a smaller company, they are the “Swiss Army knife” who holds the absolute expertise on what the brand is and where it is going.
Instead of a vague directive to “target active users,” the Context Owner codifies precise, data-driven definitions – like identifying the exact peak moment users have the highest potential of transition.
Feeding the Machine (And Keeping it Secure)
The days of formatting a PDF with beautiful whitespace are over. Modern knowledge management is about structured data. When an AI tool or a new agency generates a campaign, it needs access to specific business context. Tools like Claude, with massive context windows and dedicated Project features, can ingest this structured data to act as highly specialized, on-brand micro-agents.
But there is a catch. Feeding your deepest strategic secrets and unreleased client data into public APIs is a massive security risk.
This is where the Context Owner bridges the gap between marketing and IT. For enterprise teams, managing context also means managing where that context lives. By collaborating with IT to deploy local, open-source models running directly on company servers, the Context Owner ensures that sensitive data stays strictly behind the corporate firewall. The marketing team gets the power of automation, but the company’s proprietary knowledge remains entirely protected.
The Open Question: Will the Role Survive?
This brings us to a fascinating, and somewhat terrifying, open question. Personally, I look at this role and think it sounds like an incredible, highly impactful position to hold at a great company. But as a programmer and a marketer, I also see how fast automation is moving.
In the IT world, many companies are already handing the entire documentation process over to separate, automated AI engines. It’s highly probable that this same automation process will spread to marketing and general business data.
Does the “Context Owner” survive these rapid advancements? Will we eventually reach a point where an AI can simply scrape messy Slack channels, email chains, and old Google Drives to deduce the perfect brand context natively, rendering the role obsolete?
Technology might map the data, but I believe the human as an editor, curator, and architect will still be vital. AI can find patterns, but it cannot choose a brand’s philosophy. For now, the chaos is real, and the companies that hire Context Owners to tame it are the ones that will win.