Clay

Clay looks like a spreadsheet and behaves like a data pipeline. Each column can call a different enrichment provider, scrape a website, or ask a language model a question, and the whole table fills itself in.

Why go-to-market teams adopted it

Building a good prospect list used to mean paying several data vendors and reconciling their gaps by hand. Clay waterfalls across more than a hundred providers: if the first source lacks an email, it tries the next, and you only pay for what returns a result. Coverage goes up and cost goes down at the same time.

The AI part

Claygent is a research agent you point at a company or person with a plain-language question — does this company run a partner programme, who owns security, what stack does their careers page mention — and it browses to find out. That kind of qualification was previously manual and is where most of the leverage comes from.

Then act

Enriched records flow into email sequences, CRM records, Slack alerts, and ad audiences, so the list becomes a campaign without an export step.

Free credits let you evaluate it; paid plans scale by credits and seats. The learning curve is real, and the payoff is proportional to how specific your targeting needs to be.