# What is Context Compression?

The practice of reducing token count in an AI agent's context window while preserving the information needed to complete tasks.

Source: https://usewire.io/glossary/context-compression/
Last updated: 2026-03-31

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As AI agents work through multi-step tasks, they accumulate conversation history, tool outputs, and observations that dilute attention. Context compression techniques like structured summarization, tool response offloading, and embedding-based reduction keep the working context focused. Research shows effective compression can reduce memory usage by 26-54% while preserving task performance.

## Related terms

- [context-rot](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-rot/)
- [context-window](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-window/)
- [context-engineering](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-engineering/)
- [ai-agent](https://usewire.io/glossary/ai-agent/)