The New Vocabulary.
Day, Attio, HubSpot and the rest are inventing words faster than anyone can learn them. Context graph. Customer memory. Agent control plane. Automated skill slots. Half of the words mean three different things depending on who is selling, and the other half mean one thing nobody has explained. If you have nodded through a demo and understood nothing, this page is for you. It is confusing. You are not behind. Every term gets the plain version, the version for a five year old, and what it is not, because that is where the confusion lives.
Why it feels like this
Truckers made up a language so they could talk about the road while they were driving on it. Bear, smokey, chicken coop, back door. If you got on the channel without the words you were lost for a week, and nobody was going to slow down and explain.
The agentic platforms are doing the same thing for the same reason. The road changed and the old words do not cover it. A CRM used to be a filing cabinet with a login, and the words were cabinet words: record, field, pipeline. Now there is something in the cabinet that reads, drafts and acts, and every vendor invented its own words for the parts, at the same time, without talking to each other. Day invented the most, because Day rebuilt the most, and I am going to translate theirs with the rest.
So here is the channel, slowed down. Seven groups, roughly in the order you meet them: who is doing the work, where it lives, how it hears you, what it does, what you pay for, the channel for whoever on your team writes code, and the handful of words I made up myself and should own up to. Each one is marked with who says it: Day, most vendors, or everyone.
Who is talking
Half the confusion is that four words get used for one thing, and one word for four things. Start with who, or what, is doing the work.
Agent everyone says it
A piece of software that has been given a job and does it without you clicking every step. It reads what it needs, does the thing, and tells you what it did. Day's pricing page calls one a virtual worker you deploy to a human colleague.
If you are fiveA helper you gave a chore to. “Empty the dishwasher.” It works out where the plates go.
NotA chatbot. A chatbot answers when you type at it. An agent has a standing chore and does it whether or not you are in the room.
Agentic everyone says it
The adjective. Agentic go-to-market means agents do the reading and the drafting, and people do the deciding. Vendors put it in front of a noun so you know helpers are involved.
If you are fiveDone with helpers.
NotA different product. If you can swap the word for “with helpers” and the sentence still works, it is the same product with a new sticker.
Assistant, copilot everyone says it
A helper that waits to be asked. You type a question, it answers, and then it stops.
If you are fiveA helper you have to call over each time.
NotAn agent. The same software often does both jobs and uses both words in one sentence, and that is where most people get lost. The test is whether it does anything while you are not looking.
Model also LLM
The brain the helper rents. Claude, GPT and Gemini are models. Your CRM did not build one. It hired one and taught it your business.
If you are fiveThe tutor who comes to the house. Smart, but they do not know where you keep the cups until you show them.
NotThe product. Two CRMs can rent the same brain and behave completely differently, because the difference is what each one taught it.
Agents shaped like people Day's word
Day gives each agent a name, a job description and a title, puts it in an org chart, and says every agent reports to someone on your team. Their example roles are a pipeline analyst, meeting prep, inbox triage, a renewal radar and an onboarding coach.
If you are fiveThe helper has a name badge and a boss.
NotA gimmick. The job description is the thing you edit when it misbehaves, and the boss is the person who gets asked.
Governed agents, finished work Day's word
Day's two phrases for the same promise: the agents work under rules somebody wrote, a person approves, and what comes out is a done thing, a drafted email, a filled field, a moved stage, and not a suggestion to go and do one.
If you are fiveA helper that follows the house rules and brings you the finished chore, not a note about it.
NotAutonomous. Governed means somebody set the rules and can see what ran.
Agent control plane Day's word
The screen about the helpers: which agents exist, what each one does, what it is allowed to touch, what it did. Day's homepage splits the whole product into two halves, the context graph and the agent control plane.
If you are fiveThe chore chart on the fridge, for all the helpers at once.
NotThe CRM screen. That one is about customers. This one is about the agents.
Agent workforce Day's word
The set of agents you have running. Day's billing word: each one is a flat monthly rate, no per-seat fees, no usage pricing.
If you are fiveYour team of helpers.
NotHeadcount. Nobody is on payroll. Somebody still manages them.
Turbo agent Day's word
Day's small, low cost agent for general chores: recording meetings, drafting emails, task automation, with two skill slots. The bigger agents, Professional and up, add pipeline, campaigns and prospecting.
If you are fiveThe little helper that does the little jobs.
NotA plan for a person. On Day the plan names are agent sizes, and people are added to a workspace separately.
Skill Day says it most
A chore the agent has been taught to do on a schedule, or when something happens. Day calls them skills and says every skill keeps a history of its runs. Others say workflow, automation, playbook or recipe. When this happens, do that.
If you are fiveOne line on the chore chart.
NotA feature of the agent. A skill is written for your business, in words, and it can be wrong. Read it before you trust it.
Tool everyone says it
A thing the agent can pick up and use: send an email, read a calendar, look up a company, change a field. Day's MCP page counts twenty plus of them.
If you are fiveThe sponge. The chore is the dishes. The tool is what you do them with.
NotA skill. Skills are chores and tools are what chores get done with. A vendor saying “twenty tools” is counting sponges.
Slot Day's word
How many chores one agent can have running at the same time. Day's plans give an agent a fixed number of automated skill slots, and the top ones say how often a slot can run. When the chart is full you need another agent or a bigger plan.
If you are fiveThe chore chart has ten lines and no more.
NotA limit on how much the agent does in a day. It is a limit on how many standing chores it holds at once.
Where it lives
Every platform renamed the furniture. None of them are wrong and all of them are annoying. Day renamed the most, and some of its names are good.
Workspace everyone says it
Your copy of the product. Your people, your data, your agents, your settings. Nobody else can see in.
If you are fiveYour house, on a street of identical houses.
NotYour account. One company can have several workspaces, and that is usually a mistake.
The record system of record
The one place everyone agrees the truth about a customer lives. “Of record” means that when two systems disagree, this one wins.
If you are fiveThe grown-up copy of the list.
NotThe CRM you pay for. If your team trusts a spreadsheet more than the CRM, the spreadsheet is the record, whatever the invoice says.
Context graph Day's word
Day's name for the store underneath everything. In their words it holds what actually happened, every email, call and meeting, linked to the people, where a CRM holds fields people typed into a form somebody designed in advance. Every person and company has to resolve to one entry across every source, which is most of the work.
If you are fiveA scrapbook where every photo is already labelled with who is in it and what day it was.
NotA database with more fields. The point is that nothing was boiled down to fit a field first.
Customer memory Day's word
Day's name for the pile the context graph holds, seen from the customer's side: everything the record has read about them. Their homepage calls it an LLM-optimized ontology built from automatically permissioned ingestion, which is four words you will meet further down and one sentence you will never need to say.
If you are fiveEverything the family remembers about the neighbours, written down.
NotA summary. A summary is what somebody wrote about the pile. Memory is the pile.
Context everyone says it
What the agent is holding in its head right now, for this one task. Memory is everything it can reach for. The two words get swapped constantly.
If you are fiveContext is what is on the table. Memory is what is in the cupboard.
NotMemory. An agent with a huge memory and the wrong context still gives you a bad answer.
Ontology Day says it most
A fancy word for the agreed list of what kinds of things exist and how they relate: people work at companies, deals belong to companies, meetings have attendees. Day calls customer memory an ontology, which means the pile is organised and not only big.
If you are fiveThe rules of the filing cabinet: which drawer, and what sits next to what.
NotA feature. You already have one. It is just not written down.
RAG everyone says it
Retrieval-augmented generation. The assistant goes and finds passages of text that look like your question and reads them before it answers. Most “chat with your data” features are this. Day's guide draws the line between RAG and a context graph on purpose.
If you are fiveLooking it up in the book before you answer, instead of guessing.
NotMemory. RAG finds text that looks like the question. It does not know that two of the passages are about the same person unless something told it.
Low resolution Day's word
Day's phrase for how little of a conversation survives into a CRM. Their line is that a CRM takes the richest information a company owns and boils it down to whatever fits in a field. Full resolution keeps the whole conversation.
If you are fiveA blurry photo and a sharp one of the same day.
NotInaccurate. A low resolution record can be perfectly accurate about very little.
Company brain Day's word
The marketing name for the whole thing once it is running: the memory, the agents and the people together. “Scale your company brain” is Day's headline. A second brain is the same idea for one person, and you can build one of those in an afternoon.
If you are fiveThe family's shared memory, so nobody has to remember everything.
NotA product you can point to. It is what you have after the setup, and it is as good as what it has read.
Object everyone says it
A kind of thing the record keeps: a person, a company, a deal, a meeting. Not a programming word here.
If you are fiveA drawer in the filing cabinet, labelled by what goes in it.
NotA field. A field is one fact about the thing in the drawer.
Field property, attribute
One fact about a thing: phone number, renewal date, company size. HubSpot and Day say property, Attio says attribute, everybody else says field. Same thing.
If you are fiveOne box on the form.
NotThe thing itself. Renewal date is a field. The deal is the object.
Smart property Day's word
A field the agent keeps filled in for you, from the web and from customer memory: company size, last meeting topic, renewal month. A custom property is the ordinary kind somebody types into.
If you are fiveA box on the form that fills itself in.
NotAlways right. Read the first ten before you trust the next thousand.
People and Organizations Day's word
Day's names for contacts and companies. HubSpot says Contacts and Companies. Attio says People and Companies. Same two drawers, different labels on the front.
If you are fivePeople are people. Organizations are where they work.
NotLeads. A lead is usually a person you have not talked to yet, and some products keep leads in a third drawer. Ask where it goes once you have talked to them.
Opportunity deal
A thing you might sell, with a size, a stage and a date. Two words, one meaning.
If you are fiveA sale that has not happened yet.
NotA customer. A customer can have five of them.
Pipeline stages, funnel
The row of boxes a deal moves through, from first call to signed. A funnel is the same boxes drawn as a shape so you can see how many fall out at each step.
If you are fiveThe board game track. Stages are the squares.
NotA forecast. A forecast is a guess about which pieces reach the end.
How it hears
This is the part the old CRM never had. None of these words existed when you learned the last one, so you are not behind. The words are new.
Connect everyone says it
Giving the product permission to read your mail and calendar. A window, not a copy. If the permission goes, the window shuts.
If you are fiveLetting a friend read your diary.
NotAn import. An import copies once and stops. A connection keeps reading.
Ingestion Day's word
The same thing as connecting, said from the product's side of the window. Gmail and Calendar ingestion means the product reads your mail and calendar and keeps what it finds, and keeps doing it.
If you are fiveEating. The product eats your inbox.
NotA one time thing. That is an import. Ingestion is breakfast every day.
Sharing rules Day's word
Each person decides what of their own email and calendar the team and the agents may see. On Day that is set per person, once, and applied everywhere, including to the agents and to anything plugged in over MCP. Vendors call the whole idea permissioning.
If you are fiveYou choose which pages of your diary your sister is allowed to read.
NotAn admin setting. It is each person's own, which is why the first week of a Day setup is mostly that conversation, one inbox at a time.
Multiplayer Day's word
Day's word for more than one person in one place: everyone's mail and calendar read in with each person's own sharing rules, one context graph every agent reads and writes, and campaigns that several people's agents work together.
If you are fiveEveryone's toys in one box, and each kid decides which of theirs the others may play with.
NotShared logins. Each person's permissions still apply, to the people and to the helpers.
Sync connector, integration
Two systems keeping copies of the same thing matching. One way: A tells B. Two way: both tell each other. “Connector” and “integration” both mean there is a plug. Always ask which direction the plug sends.
If you are fiveTwo notebooks that are supposed to say the same thing.
NotAutomatic agreement. Two way syncs argue, and somebody has to decide who wins.
MCP everyone says it
Model Context Protocol. A standard shape of plug, so an AI assistant can reach into a product and use its tools. Day's page says Claude, Claude Code and Cursor can connect to a workspace this way, with each person's permissions applied and a paid agent required.
If you are fiveEvery wall has the same socket, so every lamp works.
NotA feature for your reps. It is a feature for your assistant, and for whoever builds your agents.
Transcript recording, notetaker
The agent joins the call, or reads the recording, and writes down every word. The notetaker is the bot that joins. Day's own notetaker writes the meeting into the record when it ends.
If you are fiveA friend who writes down everything everyone said and never gets tired.
NotThe summary. And if two products both send a bot, you get two bots introducing themselves on the call while your customer watches.
Enrichment everyone says it
Filling in facts about a person or a company from outside: title, company size, website, where they used to work. Often sold by credits. Often wrong by a job title or two.
If you are fiveLooking somebody up before the meeting, done for you.
NotThe truth. A person who moved jobs last month is still in last year's job on most lists.
Signal intent
A hint that somebody might be ready to buy: a job change, a visit to your pricing page, a competitor named on a call.
If you are fiveSomebody kept looking at the cookie jar.
NotA fact. A signal is a reason to check, and a person still checks.
What it does
The verbs. Every one of these has a scary version and a safe version, and the difference is one setting.
Draft everyone says it
The agent writes it. You read it. It goes nowhere until you say so. The most important word on this page.
If you are fivePencil, not pen.
NotSent. If a product cannot show you the draft before the send, it does not have drafts. It has sends.
Approval human in the loop
The setting that makes an agent ask before it does the scary thing: sending, moving a deal, deleting. If a product cannot show you where that switch is, do not connect your inbox to it.
If you are fiveAsk before you touch the stove.
NotA log. A log tells you afterwards. Approval asks you before. You want both.
Audit trail Day says it most
The list of exactly what ran, when, and what it touched. Day's line is that the audit trail says what ran and nothing went out without your approval.
If you are fiveThe chore chart with the ticks and the times on it.
NotAn approval. The trail is the after. Approval is the before.
Learning mode Day's word
A new skill can start by reporting what it would have done, without doing it, until you let it act. The safest switch on any of these pages, and the first thing to ask for.
If you are fiveTraining wheels.
NotOff. It is running. It is just not touching anything yet.
Versioned Day's word
Every skill's instructions keep their history, so when the quality drops you can see what changed and go back to the one that worked.
If you are fiveKeeping the old drawing when you redo one.
NotA backup of your data. This is a history of the instructions, not of the customers.
Proactive work Day's word
Day's description of when a skill runs: when something happens in the company, on a schedule, or whenever you ask. The first two are the whole reason to have an agent instead of an assistant.
If you are fiveThe helper starts the chore without being told, because it is Tuesday.
NotSpam. A skill that pings you every day has its line drawn in the wrong place, and fixing that is the builder's job.
Trigger everyone says it
The thing that starts a chore. When a reply arrives. Every Monday at eight. When a deal moves to a new stage.
If you are fiveThe alarm clock for the chore.
NotThe chore.
Campaign sequence, cadence
A planned set of messages to a list of people over days or weeks. Sequence and cadence are the same thing. A campaign is the whole plan, list included. On Day a campaign can be drawn from a list or from customer memory, which means “everyone we talked to about renewals in March” is a list you do not have to build.
If you are fiveThe same letter to everyone on the party list, in a planned order.
NotA conversation. The moment somebody replies they should come off the sequence and a person should answer.
Lookalike Day says it most
Find me more companies like my best customers. The word doing the work is “like”. It is only as good as what the record knows about your best customers, so a record connected last week finds lookalikes of last week. I wrote a whole note on that.
If you are fiveFind more kids like my friends. First, know your friends.
NotA list of your industry. That is a filter, and you could do it with a spreadsheet.
Net-new, web prospecting, contact identification Day's word
Three Day phrases that travel together. Net-new means accounts you have never talked to. Web prospecting means the agent goes looking for them on the open web. Contact identification means finding the right person at an account you already named.
If you are fiveNew kids, found at the park, and then working out which one is the birthday kid's mum.
NotEnrichment. Enrichment adds facts to somebody you already have.
Prospecting everyone says it
Finding people who might buy and have never heard of you, and writing to them. The outbound half. The agents that do this are the newest and the loudest, and Day's top plan calls it Prospecting as a Service.
If you are fiveKnocking on doors.
NotFollowing up. Following up is a conversation that already started.
Forward-deployed Day's word
A person from the vendor who works inside your setup with you. Day's top plan includes a forward-deployed account executive who builds your lists, sequences and reporting with you. The phrase is borrowed from engineering, where a forward-deployed engineer sits at the customer's desk.
If you are fiveThe shop sends someone to your house to set the toy up.
NotSupport. Support answers tickets. Forward-deployed builds beside you, and on Day it is on the top plan only.
Delegation Day says it most
Handing a chore to a teammate's agent, or to a person, with a way to check whether it got done.
If you are fiveAsking your brother to do your chore, and checking.
NotForwarding an email.
Playbook everyone says it
A written way of handling a situation that a person or an agent follows. In the old world it was a PDF nobody opened. Now it is what the agent reads before it acts.
If you are fiveThe instructions on the back of the box.
NotA sequence. A sequence is messages. A playbook is judgment written down.
What you pay for
The pricing pages invented a whole second set of words, and most of them are about one question: are you paying for people, or for work?
Seat everyone says it
One login for one person. The old way. Ten people, ten seats, every month.
If you are fiveA ticket per kid.
NotA person who only reads. Some platforms let a person look for free and charge for the agent working beside them. Ask.
Per agent Day says it most
You pay for each helper, not each person. Day's page says it in six words: no per-seat fees, no usage-based pricing.
If you are fiveYou pay for the helper, not the family.
NotCheaper by default. Ten agents can cost more than ten seats. It depends on what you were about to hire for.
Free seats, colleagues Day's word
Day's shape: once a workspace has one paid agent at Professional or above, colleagues can be added at no cost. A free user can search, view and share, and their mail and meetings still feed the record.
If you are fiveOne kid pays for the pool and the brothers swim free.
NotA free plan for a whole company. Somebody has to hold a paid agent for the door to open.
Credits everyone says it
Tokens you buy, and the AI spends them when it does work. The big machines eat more, and enrichment and AI-filled fields are the big machines. Ask what refills them, when they expire, and what happens when they run out mid-month. Day does not use them; several others do.
If you are fiveArcade tokens. The claw machine takes four.
NotUnlimited. Nothing with the word credits on the page is unlimited.
Tokens the other kind
The pieces a model reads text in. A page of text is about a thousand. It is why a long call costs more to summarise than a short one, and why some pricing pages mention them at all.
If you are fiveThe bricks a sentence is built from.
NotCredits. Credits are what you buy. Tokens are what the model counts.
Tier plan
The bundle. The names mean nothing across vendors. Professional on one page and Pro on another are not the same thing, and on Day a tier is the size of an agent. Count the agents, the slots and the approvals, not the adjectives.
If you are fiveSmall, medium, large, but every shop uses different cups.
NotA promise about what ships next.
Free plan trial
A free plan is the product, forever, without paying, with limits. A trial is the whole product for a while, and then you pay or you leave. Pricing pages use the two words loosely, so read which one is on offer before you connect anything.
If you are fiveA free sample, or a free toy. Only one of them is yours.
NotThe same thing. One of them ends.
The engineers' channel
Day publishes a second vocabulary aimed at whoever on your team is comfortable in a terminal. If nobody is, you can skip this channel and lose nothing. If somebody is, these are the words they will come back saying.
Harness Day's word
A set of written instructions a coding assistant follows to set up, check and improve a workspace. Day publishes one as a free repository called GTM Brain and calls it the world's first RevOps harness. It runs on a developer's machine, not in the product.
If you are fiveThe instruction booklet, but the robot reads it instead of you.
NotPart of the product you log into. If nobody on your team has a terminal open, it does not apply to you.
GTM engineer Day says it most
A newer job title for the person who builds and wires the go-to-market tools, somewhere between RevOps and a developer. Day's harness is aimed at them.
If you are fiveThe kid who knows how to set up everyone's games.
NotA salesperson with a laptop. A GTM engineer writes things that run.
Eval grade, company brain evaluation
A test with a pass bar and a schedule for running it again. Day ships one as a free skill that scores a setup on safety, performance, capability and adoption; their guide calls it grading two layers, the memory and the agents.
If you are fiveA report card for the helpers.
NotA demo. A demo shows what it can do once. An eval shows whether it still does it on Tuesday.
Skills, the other kind Claude Code, npx skills add
Outside the workspace, “skill” also means a folder of instructions a coding assistant loads for one job, installed with a command. Same word, different cupboard. When somebody says skill, ask which one.
If you are fiveA recipe card for the robot.
NotA Day skill. That one lives in the workspace and runs on a schedule.
Deploy, orchestrate, versioned deployment Day says it most
Switching an agent or a skill on for real, in a known version, in a known order. Engineering words for “turn it on carefully and be able to turn it back off.”
If you are fivePutting the toy together by the numbers, so you can take it apart again.
NotLaunching. Launching is a party. Deploying is a checklist.
Words from the road
I have been adding to the pile too. In fairness, mine, plus the one phrase of Day's that this whole section is a reply to.
Life After CRM Day's phrase
The title of the essay by Day's founder arguing that the record should write itself and the CRM, as a form people type into, is over. The first note on this site is the reply from the road.
If you are fiveThe grown-ups said the old game is over and started a new one.
NotA product name. It is the argument the products are built on.
Agentic go-to-market ours
Your CRM listens to every call, email and meeting, keeps all of it, and tells your team the next thing worth doing. A person still makes the call.
If you are fiveThe helpers listen. You decide.
NotRobots selling. Nothing we build sends anything a person did not approve.
The janitor ours
Me. The person who goes in after everyone else and cleans up the decisions nobody wrote down, and then builds what the business should have had.
If you are fiveThe one with the mop.
NotA consultant. A consultant writes the document. The janitor is in the building.
A watch ours
A standing promise that a person looks at something on a schedule and tells you when it matters. Mechanisms are cheap. The promise is what you pay for.
If you are fiveSomeone whose job is to notice.
NotAn alert. An alert fires. A watch is read.
The on-ramp ours
How the people on the road get onto the highway without stopping to type. The first note draws the whole picture, and the newest one says where I think the road goes.
If you are fiveThe slope that gets you onto the fast road without stopping.
NotA product. Day builds the software. The ramp is what a person does with it.
The two words that matter
If you remember two words off this page, make them draft and approval. Everything else is furniture and pricing. Those two decide whether a helper is something you supervise or something you clean up after. Every product on the market will show you where the switches are if you ask, and a few will show you before you ask. Those are the ones.
And if a vendor uses a word that is not here, ask them for the five year old version. If they cannot give you one, the word is doing something other than explaining.
Day's terms are quoted from day.ai, its pricing page, its MCP page and three of its guides (context graph against RAG against CRM, grading an agent setup, and why CRM data is out of date), all read November 5, 2026. The rest are as the other vendors' own sites use them on the same day. The analogies are mine and none of the vendors approved them. If I have a word wrong, tell me and I will fix it on this page, which is the whole point of a page instead of a PDF.
Send me the word that lost you.
Thirty minutes, on the phone or on a video call, whichever you hate less. Bring the demo you sat through and the words you nodded at, and I will translate them into what the thing would do in your business on a Tuesday. If the answer is that you do not need any of it yet, I will say so, and you will have spent half an hour and gained a straight answer.
No sequence, nothing automated. One personal follow-up from me after the call, and the word "no" ends it.