An entity is a curated view of one Salesforce object. Not the object. A view of it, built for an agent to read.
If you’ve built a page layout, you already have the instinct. A layout decides what a person sees when they open a record: which fields, in what order, which related lists. An entity does the same job for an agent, and then goes further, because an agent needs things a person doesn’t.
What’s in one
Fields, in deliberate order. The 22 that matter out of the 212 available. Order matters to a language model more than it does to a person; what comes first gets weighed more.
Formulas and rollups. Summary values computed over child records — open pipeline on an Account, days since last activity, count of open Cases — so the agent gets a number rather than fifty rows to add up.
Filtered related lists. Not every Contact. The decision-makers. Not every Opportunity. The open ones over a threshold. The filter is part of the definition.
The parent. An Opportunity entity can embed the Account it belongs to, curated the same way, so one request returns the context a person would have had three clicks to assemble.
Enrichments. Computed signals from your own code: an Apex provider, an invocable action, a Flow, a declared Data 360 element. A health score, a risk flag, an external lookup. Composed by configuration, not a custom tool per use case.
Instructions. This is the part a page layout never had. Guidance attached at the entity level and at the field level, delivered alongside the value it explains.
Instructions are the point
A semantic layer tells an agent what a field means. An entity also tells it how to use the value.
Health score below 60 warrants outreach. Sourced from the customer success platform, refreshed nightly. Internal only; never quote to a customer.
That’s not documentation for a person. It’s a directive for the agent, and it rides with the field every time the field is delivered. The knowledge someone picks up in their second month and never writes down gets written down once, here.
Three depth levels
The same entity renders at three depths, so a list view and a deep dive draw from the same definition. A find-records call returns the shallow form for twenty records. A get-record call returns the full form for one. Nobody maintains two definitions.
What you don’t do
You don’t write a query. You don’t decide joins. You don’t manage who can see what — that’s enforced by Salesforce field-level security and sharing, applied to the query itself, for whoever is asking. The author of an entity controls what’s in the context. They never control who may see it.
Entities are initialized from your existing layouts, so the first version of one is a few minutes of editing, not a blank canvas.
