Teach HAL how your business runs.

What it is

Operating context is a structured profile per project — and optionally per account — that you configure once and revisit occasionally. Fields typically cover: what you sell, who you sell to, current bottleneck (support capacity? activation? pipeline?), hard constraints (team size, response-time promises), and near-term goals.

The fields that matter most

• The current bottleneck — one sentence. This single field most changes which recommendation rises to focus.
• Constraints — what the team can't do right now. Recommendations respect them instead of suggesting two hires.
• Definitions — what counts as "activation," "at-risk," "qualified" in your business. Health signals and insights align to your definitions, not generic ones.

How it's used

• Focus — weighs pressure against context: during a launch month, support response beats pipeline polish.
• AI answers — suggestions and deflection speak in your terms and respect your policies.
• Work proposals — drafts target the bottleneck, not generic best practice.

Using it well

• Be specific about the bottleneck. "Support is slow" is noise. "First response time doubled because we're all at a conference this week" changes what HAL proposes.
• Keep constraints current. Stale constraints produce confidently wrong priorities — a two-minute monthly review is enough.
• Update when the business shifts — new pricing, a new hire, a new product line. Each is a context change, not just a note in Slack.

Context everywhere

The same principle extends to customers: identification traits, CRM fields, and tracked events are context about them. Operating context is context about you. HAL reasons over both.