# Universal Context

> Attio is your living context layer that connects every signal — emails, meetings, product usage, billing, support tickets, Slack threads, external tools, and agents — and compounds context, so your team always knows what to do next. Built on Attio's Particle data model with semantic and full-text search, it is the first CRM data layer to provide External Consistency: the index agents use stays exactly in sync with the underlying data, with no replication lag. Universal Context powers Ask Attio and every Attio agent, and is reachable from any tool over MCP.

## What is Universal Context?
Universal Context is Attio's unified intelligence layer. It indexes every go-to-market signal — records, emails, calls, notes, meetings, product usage, billing, support, and connected tools — as one interconnected whole that people and agents share.
- **Built on Particle** — Attio's graph-relational data model, giving every agent one shape to read all your GTM data
- **Semantic and full-text search** — retrieval by meaning or by exact word, over the same index
- **External Consistency** — the highest level of transactional consistency, so the index agents use stays exactly in sync with the data
- **Always current** — every change is readable the instant it happens, by every person and agent

## What it captures
Universal Context connects and indexes:
- Emails and calendar events
- Meetings and call recordings
- Notes and tasks
- Product usage, billing, and support signals
- Enrichment and web research
- Agent activity
- Connected tools over MCP — Granola, Slack, Notion, Linear, Fin, and more

## Scale
- **100M** — records per object, at speeds that once required a data warehouse
- **76K+** — agents reading the layer live, in production

## What it powers
Every Attio AI product runs on the same layer:
- **Ask Attio** — ask any question and get a precise answer drawn from live signal
- **Custom agents and workflows** — act on what is true right now
- **Call intelligence** — every call becomes context the moment it ends
- **Enrichment** — external signals folded into the same picture

## How agents reach it
- **Over MCP** — agents in ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code, and any MCP client get the same consistency and indexing guarantees as agents inside Attio
- **In SQL** — the whole layer is queryable in SQL, the language agents already write
- **By meaning or by word** — semantic retrieval and exact full-text search over one index
- **Extensible** — build with custom JavaScript, the Attio App SDK, and your own blocks

## What makes it different
- **Source, not synthesis** — Universal Context is the live system of record made agent-native, not a replicated summary bolted on top
- **The first CRM with External Consistency** — the embeddings agents use are always exactly in sync with the data, so nothing goes stale
- **One data model** — Particle holds structured, enriched, and unstructured data together, so agents reason over all of it in one shape
- **Consistent across platforms** — an agent writing from one tool is visible to an agent reading from another, in real time

## Security & Permissions
- **Authenticated as you** — an agent sees exactly what you can see in Attio, and nothing more
- **Scoped per person** — user-scoped OAuth on every connection
- **Verified before it runs** — actions are checked before they touch your data

## Use Cases
### Sales
- Walk into every call with the history already assembled: emails, meetings, and calls in one place
- Prioritize accounts on live signal rather than stale fields
- Ask any question about an account and get a sourced answer in seconds

### Customer Success
- Catch churn early as usage dips and conversations cool, read as one pattern
- See every interaction a customer has had across the team on one record
- Spot expansion windows as product usage and account signals line up

### Revenue Operations
- Report on data that stays live and consistent across every record
- Give every agent and workflow one shape to read all your GTM data
- Query the whole context layer directly in SQL

## Common Questions
**How is this different from a vector database bolted onto a CRM?**
Legacy platforms add a separate vector store, such as Pinecone or Turbopuffer, that replicates the source data and drifts out of sync. Universal Context holds the embeddings inside the same transactional system as the data, so they are always consistent.

**Can agents outside Attio use it?**
Yes. Over Attio's MCP server, agents in ChatGPT, Claude, and other platforms operate on the same live source with the same guarantees as agents inside Attio.

**Is Universal Context a separate product?**
No. It is the foundational layer every Attio AI product runs on.

**How does search work?**
Semantic retrieval and exact full-text search run over the same index, and the layer is queryable directly in SQL.

## Getting Started
- <a href="https://app.attio.com/welcome/sign-in">Start for free</a>
- <a href="https://attio.com/platform/universal-context">Universal Context product page</a>
- <a href="https://attio.com/engineering/blog/introducing-universal-context">Introducing Universal Context (engineering blog)</a>

## Related pages
- <a href="https://attio.com/platform/ask/llms.txt">Ask Attio</a>
- <a href="https://attio.com/platform/custom-agents/llms.txt">Custom agents</a>
- <a href="https://attio.com/platform/web-agent/llms.txt">Web Agent</a>
- <a href="https://attio.com/platform/mcp/llms.txt">MCP</a>
- <a href="https://attio.com/platform/workflows/llms.txt">Workflows</a>
- <a href="https://attio.com/llms.txt">Complete platform overview</a>