1 min lesson
Clay as an orchestration layer
Walk through each part of "Clay as an orchestration layer", then explain what each one does.
Step 1 of 2
When a Cursor practical round says "build an enrichment, scoring and routing workflow," the default canvas is Clay. Know its primitives cold and you can spend the round on judgment instead of hunting for the right column type.
Clay is a spreadsheet that can call the internet. Each row is a person or company, each column is either data you imported or an action Clay runs against that row. The tool collapses into five building blocks, and a strong candidate names them before touching a single provider.
The five Clay primitives
- Table
- The working set. One row per lead or account, the unit everything else operates on.
- Source
- How rows arrive: a CSV, an export from your CRM, the customer system of record, a search like Apollo or LinkedIn, or a webhook from a form.
- Enrichment column
- A call to a data provider such as Apollo, Hunter or BuiltWith that fills a field for that row. Check which providers Clay currently offers before you design a chain.
- Formula column
- Deterministic logic: concatenate, normalize a domain, branch on a value, compute a score.
- AI column
- An LLM prompt run per row, for classification, summarization or written personalization.
Tables hold rows; columns either import data or take an action on it.