Most approaches to grounding an agent stop at data: a field list, a schema, a query result. Data is a third of what an agent needs. ContextWorks carries all three — data, semantics, and process — in four pieces.
Entities — the records
A curated view of one object. Fields, rollups, filtered related lists, computed signals, instructions. Covered in the last post. If you take away one thing: an entity is what an agent reads when it opens an Account, and it’s shaped by someone who knows what matters on an Account.
Briefs — the institutional knowledge
Every company has framing an agent needs, and it lives in people and documents rather than in records:
- How you segment accounts, and what each segment implies
- What a stage actually means here, versus what the picklist label says
- Your brand voice, for anything the agent drafts
- Policy: what it must never say to a customer
Today this knowledge is in a methodology deck, an enablement wiki, and the heads of three people. When it reaches an agent at all, it’s pasted into that agent’s instructions — and into the next agent’s, slightly differently.
A brief is that knowledge as a governed artifact. Authored once by the function that owns it — marketing owns voice, enablement owns methodology — versioned, and injected per domain. Nobody rewrites it inside an agent.
Skills — how the work is done
An agent asked to review a deal will invent a process, and a different one next time. For recurring work, two runs need to be comparable.
A skill is a procedure: the steps, in order, referencing entities and briefs by name. Because it says open pipeline rather than spelling out a filter, the definition can change underneath without the skill needing an edit. And because it’s an artifact rather than part of one agent, any agent can run it — including agents on other platforms.
Domains — a purpose-built access point
A domain composes the other three into one access point for a purpose. The Renewals domain carries the Account and Contract entities as the CS team defines them, the renewal-policy brief, and the renewal-review skill. The Pipeline domain carries Opportunity as Sales defines it, with different instructions on the same amount field.
Every retrieval names a domain. That’s what lets Sales own pipeline definitions while Finance owns theirs, without either team blocking the other — and what lets one agent be scoped to exactly the context its job needs, rather than the whole org’s.
How they’re delivered
ContextWorks never calls a model. It returns markdown or JSON. So anything that reads text reads the context: an MCP client like Claude or ChatGPT, an Agentforce action, Prompt Builder, a Flow, Apex. One set of definitions behind all of them.
