Name: Keynote: Context is More Than Tools - Why the "C" in MCP is More Relevant Than Ever - Ryan Cooke, Engineering Lead, WorkOS
Start: 2026-04-03T09:20:00-0400
End: 2026-04-03T09:30:00-0400

April 2-3, 2026
New York, NY
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Keynote: Context is More Than Tools - Why the "C" in MCP is More Relevant Than Ever - Ryan Cooke, Engineering Lead, WorkOS

Friday April 3, 2026 9:20am - 9:30am EDT

Broadway Ballroom (6th Floor)

Large language models excel at navigating information spread across files, tools, and systems. They can grep, synthesize, and reason about what to look for in response to user prompts. And while this capability improves, a different constraint is emerging: semantic alignment.
This talk focuses on the premise of context engines. These are systems that encode how an organization’s knowledge is structured and interpreted. In many companies, a term like “customer,” “account,” or “environment” means different things depending on the team or workflow. A context engine captures those relationships and semantics, making them usable both for search and as structured context for LLMs.
Unlike naive RAG approaches that retrieve documents, context engines provide meaning. They help LLMs interpret intent, disambiguate internal terminology, and reason within the mental model of a specific organization or domain. The same semantic layer that improves search also improves prompting, tool selection, and response quality.
We’ll explore why the “C” in MCP matters more than ever, how context engines complement modern LLM workflows, and what it looks like to move beyond tools toward shared, durable context.

Speakers

Ryan Cooke

Engineering Lead, WorkOS

Ryan Cooke is a technologist and founder with two decades of experience building early-stage startups. Despite several founding roles, he remains a developer at heart, drawn to hard problems in information retrieval, security and data modeling. He’s led engineering teams across... Read More →

Friday April 3, 2026 9:20am - 9:30am EDT
Broadway Ballroom (6th Floor)

Keynote Sessions

MCP Dev Summit North America

Ryan Cooke

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