Manage your context, not your content.
Most people trying to get more out of AI are making more content. I went the other way: I had AI read every conversation I’d saved, so it works from what we actually know. What comes back is different, right down to a late father’s words, returned to his son.
More content, thinner work.
More posts, more decks, more first drafts. It feels like progress, because there’s more of it.
But AI works with what it’s handed. Give it a thin description of your company, the kind that says “we help people achieve their potential,” and it hands thin work back, faster. Left alone, it writes the generic version every time.
So I stopped asking how to get AI to write more. I started asking what it needs to know to write well. That’s what I mean by context: what you know, written down where people and AI can both use it.
I made our history readable by AI.
I’d saved my conversations for years: client calls, workshops, recordings of my own thinking out loud. Almost 3,000 of them. Every one has now been read in full by Claude, the AI model we work with, not skimmed. When I ask it a question about my own history, the answer comes back in seconds, in the words people used at the time.
I wrote this website long, on purpose, so AI search tools find the whole picture: every service, every way we work, and the reason behind each one, in plain words.
And I keep one file of Storyminers facts: what we offer, how we work, what it costs. Every proposal, letter, and page is checked against that file before it goes anywhere. When a fact changes, an automatic check finds every place it appears.
A father’s words, back with his son.
Last week I wrote to the son of a client I first worked with in 2010. I’d worked with his father, who passed away a couple of years ago. The son leads the business now.
My note quoted his father, word for word, from the interviews his father and I did together back then. For the son, that was personal. I offered to let him ask his own questions of everything we recorded in those years. By the time he said yes, Claude and I had already asked and answered them, and a presentation, a short summary, an email, and a video collage were waiting for a couple of edits.
That isn’t speed for its own sake. It’s what happens when the context is already there, and the work only has to package it.
“I’m kind of betting that the way to go forward is not to manage your content. It’s to manage your context. That’s the bet.”
Mike Wittenstein, on a recorded call with a colleague, 28 October 2026
Context pays off in small ways every day, too. My writing gets built faster, it’s better, and it sounds more like me, because it starts from everything already written down instead of a blank page.
A test you can run today.
Ask an AI search tool, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Claude, five hard questions about your company. Then ask the same five about Storyminers, and compare the answers.
- What does this company do, in one sentence?
- Who does it do it for?
- What’s different about how it works?
- What does it cost to start?
- Why would someone pick it over the alternatives?
If your answers come back thin, the problem isn’t the tool. It can only work with what it can find.
The bet: context first.
Content is what you hand out. Context is what you know, written down well enough that people and AI can both use it. Get the context right, and the content gets easier and sounds more like you. Skip it, and you get the generic version, faster.
The best strategy work I’ve done has started from what people already knew but hadn’t put into words. That part of the work hasn’t changed. What’s changed is how much of it can now be kept, found, and used again.
Keep everything.
Start saving your thinking, if you aren’t already: the recordings and transcripts, not just the notes. Say your thinking out loud. How I learned that, starting around 2000, is on the page How we use AI.
How this piece was written
Drafted with Claude, the AI model Storyminers works with, from Mike’s own words on a recorded call with a colleague on 28 October 2026; the quote is his, word for word. Mike reads and approves every line before it goes up.
Which tools we use, and for what: How we use AI.
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