Learn and master Clay with Clay university

Last updated: June 24, 2026

Clay is growing fast, and we're adding new features all the time. We want to keep you up to date with the latest and greatest, so we're rebuilding our education materials from the ground up to cover all of it. To kick things off, here's a quick overview of where Clay stands today before you dive into the rest of this course.

Get Started in Clay

Clay can do a lot, and that's exactly what makes it intimidating at the start. This guide cuts through it: by the end you'll have built your first enriched table using the one workflow every feature in Clay is built on. It's called FETE: Find, Enrich, Transform, Export.

🧭 The FETE Framework

Ignore almost every button on the home screen. The only one that matters first is Find people, because everything starts with data. From there, four steps carry you end to end:

• Find: build a starting list of people or companies.
• Enrich: fill in the data you need, from work emails to AI research.
• Transform: clean and reshape that data so it's usable.
• Export: push it to wherever it needs to live.

Master these four and you've got the core of Clay!

Every advanced feature, e.g. Signals, Ads, Campaigns, Claygents, and Functions, is just another layer of abstraction on top of these same actions.

🔍 Find: Build Your List

We'll use Sculptor, Clay's AI copilot, to draft a search in plain English: find all heads, directors, or VPs of data science at software development companies located in New York.

Sculptor is strongest here on the search side, because it turns your sentence into real filters that you can then check by hand:

1. Review each filter Sculptor adds. Confirm the industry, the seniority (Head, Director, VP), and the location are correct.
2. Loosen filters that are too narrow. Swap an exact title match for job titles similar to "data science" so you don't over-restrict on specific title combinations.
3. Check the result count. This search returns 134 people: narrow enough to be a clean example, though likely too narrow for a real deploy.
4. Click Continue and save to a new Workbook and table.

One warning: don't over-rely on Sculptor to build your tables. Confirm that what it returns is accurate before you trust it, so it's a tool that speeds you up rather than a way to outsource your thinking.

✨ Enrich: Fill In the Data

The first action to add to any new table is an Enrich Person or Enrich Company action. It returns a wealth of legible data to start from, and it automatically unlocks the downstream waterfalls drawn from Clay's ecosystem of 150+ providers (and growing).

Every enrichment lives in the tools modal in the top-right corner. There are two kinds worth knowing on Day One.

Waterfall Enrichments

A waterfall runs a request through many providers in sequence, until one returns a validated result. The most famous is the Work Email enrichment, which checks provider after provider to find a valid work email for each row.

Waterfalls are also where Clay's pricing works in your favor:

• You only spend credits on data you actually find. If nothing comes back, Clay refunds the credits from that search.
• No double-charging on validation. If a provider returns an email Clay has already invalidated, it skips the re-check and moves to the next step.

Coverage climbs as the waterfall runs: an early provider might cover 60 to 70% of the first ten rows, and each additional provider fills more of the gaps until coverage approaches 100%.

(Note: those figures are from one live run, and should not be treated as a guaranteed benchmark.)

AI Enrichments

Click Use AI and you can collect almost any data point you'd otherwise gather by hand. In this example we ask AI to find recent thought leadership for each person: an interview, conference, blog, or event, less than six months old, returning at least the top three items.

Clay's AI meta-prompter turns that request into a structured prompt. Map the person's full name and company name as inputs, leave the rest, and let it run across your rows.

🧹 Transform: Clean It Up

Once the data is in, Transform reshapes it. Hover over View All Enrichments to see the catalog. Using AI or code, you can extract recent company news or training programs, normalize phone numbers that arrive in different formats, and normalize company names.

Anything that doesn't ping an external API costs no credits, because Clay only charges credits where it gets charged on the other end. Every operation also consumes an action, but you should have those in bountiful supply.

📤 Export: Send It Live

Once you've found the data, enriched it through waterfalls and AI, and transformed it clean, export it to wherever it needs to live. For most people that's a CRM or a sequencer. As your usage grows, it becomes an Audience, which has its own dedicated course.

That's the whole loop: find a targeted list, enrich it across 150-plus providers, clean it, and push it live.

🚀 What's Next

You now know the core workflow that runs through all of Clay: Find, Enrich, Transform, Export. You've built a list with Sculptor, enriched it with a work-email waterfall and an AI research column, seen how credits are charged, and sent it onward.

Next, layer the advanced features on top of this foundation. Signals, ads, campaigns, Claygents, and Functions all build on these same four actions, and Audiences is the natural next step once your exports outgrow a single table.