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 + routing workflow,” the default canvas is Clay. Knowing its primitives cold lets you spend the round on judgment, not on 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 whole 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: CSV, CRM import, a search like Apollo/LinkedIn or a webhook from a form
- Enrichment column
- a call to a provider (Clearbit, Apollo, Hunter, BuiltWith) that fills a field for that row
- 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.