A workflow is a set of automated steps that runs inside Ocean: when something happens, take these actions. Instead of searching, enriching, scoring, and exporting by hand every time, you build the logic once and Ocean runs it for you — on a schedule, when a deal closes, or on demand.
You'll find workflows in the left sidebar under Workflows.
What you can build
A few examples of what workflows automate:
Every Monday, find companies hiring for sales roles and send them to your CRM.
When a deal closes, find its 25 closest lookalikes and add them to a nurture sequence.
Score new signups against your ICP and post the hot ones to Slack.
Pull your total addressable market, keep the high-fit accounts, and find a contact at each.
Two ways to build
The fastest way to start is to describe your goal in plain language and let the Assistant build a draft for you — most people start here. You can also build by hand, adding steps to the canvas one at a time. Either way, you end up with the same kind of workflow, and you can always fine-tune what the Assistant builds.
How a workflow is structured
Every workflow is a chain you read top to bottom:
A trigger starts the workflow. A trigger is the event that kicks things off — a repeating schedule, a deal closing in your CRM, or an external system calling the workflow. Every workflow has one Start.
Steps define what the workflow does once it's triggered. Each step does one job — find companies, research them with AI, filter, send to your CRM, post to Slack — and hands its results to the next step.
Records flow through the steps one by one. A record is a single company or person moving through the workflow. Ocean tracks every record at every step, so you can always see exactly where each account got to.
The five layers
Steps are grouped into five layers, and most workflows use them in this order:
Trigger — starts the workflow.
Sourcing — brings records in (a segment, a company search, a people search).
Intelligence — enriches and scores records (AI research, segmentation scoring, website data).
Flow — controls what happens to each record (route, branch, filter, wait).
Activation — does something with the results (send to CRM, enroll in a sequence, post to Slack, export to CSV).
You don't need to memorize these to build your first workflow — they're here so the Steps library is easy to browse once you're ready to add more.
Credits
Some steps cost credits when they run — searching, enriching, and AI research all consume credits based on how many records they process. Steps that just move records around (route, filter, wait, notify) are free. Each step shows its cost on the canvas, so you always know what a run will cost before you publish.
See Credits in workflows for the full breakdown.
Who can use workflows
Workflows are available to your whole workspace. Anyone on your team can build, publish, and monitor them.