Clay created a profession. Not through marketing — through radical transparency.

Jordan Crawford and Eric Nowoslawski gave away every play. The workflows, the logic, the automations. But also the business sense: how to think about customers, how to bring value from first outreach, how to build target lists that make sense for prospects, not just for you. Replicating it was hard enough that people hired them anyway.

The flywheel took hold. 60+ Clay clubs across 30 countries. Agencies scaling to $1M+ ARR in under a year. A whole profession — the GTM Engineer — emerged from content.

Clay became the infrastructure underneath. But the profession is evolving past the platform that created it.

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Here's what's happening now: everyone is fighting to be the center.

Not just CRMs and meeting platforms. Everyone. Outreach tools adding AI assistants. Email clients adding intelligence layers. Calendar apps expanding into "time optimization." Note-taking tools positioning as "second brains." Enrichment platforms trying to be research hubs. Meeting recorders pivoting to "deal intelligence."

They're all converging on the same question: where does the human actually live?

The answer is emerging, and it's not what any of them expected. The humans are migrating to the AI layer itself. Claude. Cursor. ChatGPT. The tools become APIs in the background. Useful, necessary — but not where you think anymore.

Eric Nowoslawski said it plainly: "I've been using Cursor as the front end to my work. I'm not really clicking buttons anymore except in Clay."

He's still running batch plays — processing hundreds of thousands of contacts through Clay webhooks. But he's building and orchestrating it all through Claude. The scale hasn't changed. The interface has.

Jordan Crawford is doing the same from the other direction. 90% of his GTM engineering happens in Claude Code now — connecting CRM, enriched data, and action tools into unified systems. He's working high-touch accounts, not mass campaigns. Different scale, same destination.

Both are building something that looks less like a workflow and more like a brain.

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This is what I'm calling the GTM Cortex.

Not another tool. Not another workflow. An intelligence layer that holds institutional knowledge, connects to everything you use, and surfaces what matters. You provide judgment. It handles the synthesis.

**What it encodes:**

- ICP definitions that evolve with market learning

- Playbooks with conditional logic, not static documents

- Relationship memory across buying committees

- Signal interpretation calibrated to your specific definitions

**What it orchestrates:**

- CRM operations

- Enrichment calls

- Outreach execution

- Calendar coordination

- Content personalization

The difference from current tools: this isn't trigger-based automation executing atomic operations when conditions match. It's context-aware reasoning that synthesizes across sources, remembers what happened last quarter, and generates judgment — not just output.

Clay is optimized for scale. Batch sends. Mass personalization. Ten thousand emails with dynamic fields. Powerful when you're working fifty thousand accounts. But when you're working fifty accounts, when you need to multi-thread a buying committee, when the relationship matters more than the volume — the architecture changes. The Cortex fills that gap.

And as Eric demonstrates, it works at scale too. The Claude layer can orchestrate batch operations just as easily as high-touch ones. The pattern is general.

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The moat here isn't the tool. It's what you encode.

Your ICP definitions. Your playbooks. Your institutional memory. The way you think about customers. The signals that matter to your specific business. No vendor can figure that out for you. No off-the-shelf product holds context the way your own system can.

This is what makes the Cortex defensible — the intelligence is yours, baked into a system you control.

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There's an infrastructure layer forming underneath all this.

These Claude projects need to run somewhere. MCP servers need hosting. Workflow engines need homes. The builders are asking where to put it all. Trigger.dev for batch jobs. Supabase for storage. Modal for compute. Railway for always-on services.

The pattern Clay established — empower the creators, give them a stage, let them share architectures publicly — could repeat here. The GTM Engineers who are building these systems bring enormous value to whatever platforms they adopt. They create content. They train others. They generate organic demand.

Whoever captures this layer inherits the same flywheel dynamics. Not by building the Cortex for people — by enabling people to build their own.

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What we're watching is a profession evolving in real time.

The GTM Engineer emerged from Clay's ecosystem. The GTM Cortex is what comes next — not a tool, but a pattern. A way of encoding business intelligence into systems that think alongside you.

The infrastructure question is still open. The architecture is still forming. But the direction is clear: the thinking is moving to the AI layer, and everything else is becoming the API underneath.