The terms below appear throughout workflows and this help center. Look one up when you hit an unfamiliar word — you don't need to read this end to end before building anything.

A set of automated steps that runs when its trigger fires. See Overview of workflows.

The event that starts a workflow — a schedule, a deal closing, or an external call. Every workflow has exactly one Start. See Triggers.

A single action in a workflow, like "Companies search" or "Notify". Steps are grouped into five layers: Trigger, Sourcing, Intelligence, Flow, and Activation. See Steps library overview.

The category a step belongs to. Layers describe a step's job: Sourcing brings records in, Intelligence enriches and scores them, Flow controls their path, and Activation does something with them.

A single company or person moving through the workflow. A step either passes each record forward, drops it, or — in the case of Extract people — turns one company record into several people records. See Companies vs people in a workflow.

One execution of the workflow, started by a schedule, a manual trigger, or an event. A run enrolls a batch of records and moves them through the steps.

The view that shows every record and which step it reached, updating live as a workflow runs. See Monitor with Activity.

Your unpublished changes. The canvas autosaves as you edit, but those edits don't run until you publish. See Publish, drafts, and versions.

The action that makes your draft the live version. Runs already in progress finish on the version they started on.

The toggle that controls whether a published workflow runs. A Live workflow fires on its trigger; an Inactive one is paused.

The way one step reads an earlier step's output — you type @ in a prompt, condition, or message to insert a field from an upstream step. See Reference earlier steps with @-mentions.

What steps cost when they run. Sourcing, enrichment, and AI steps consume credits; flow and notification steps are free. See Credits in workflows.

The chat that builds and edits your workflow draft from a plain-language description. It lives inside the workflow builder and only works on that draft — it's a different feature from Ocean Chat, the product-wide AI chat in the main sidebar. See Build with the Assistant.