Set up ecosystems and verticals in the Agent Training Center

Ecosystems and verticals describe the markets you sell into, so the agents know who to qualify, what to research, and how to map personas. You set them up in the Agent Training Center, on the Ecosystems page. Use this page when you are first calibrating the workspace, or whenever you add a new market segment or a sandbox to test agent criteria. For the wider picture of how this training shapes agent behavior, see Agent Training Center.

Before you start

You need an Admin role to create or change anything here. With a Read-only or Salespeople role you can open the pages and see everything, but the Add new button, the per-card menu, the status control, and the per-vertical controls are hidden, so you cannot create or edit. For who gets which role, see Roles and access.
The Agent Training Center is reached from Agent Training Center in the left navigation. Its overview then offers two separate areas for this work: Ecosystems and Research Agent Sandboxes.

The two kinds of ecosystem

Each kind has its own page, reached from its own card on the Agent Training Center overview:

Ecosystems - a network of verticals that share goals and target customers. This is the kind most calibration starts with, and the only kind that carries personas, statuses, and priorities.
Research Agent Sandboxes - a place to test research agents against named companies without affecting live ecosystems. A sandbox holds accounts rather than verticals, and a banner inside one confirms it is for testing purposes only and does not impact ecosystems.

You can also move between them from the panel on the left of any ecosystem or sandbox, which lists both groups under the headings Ecosystems and Research Agent Sandboxes and offers a plus icon on each heading to create another one.

Steps: add an ecosystem or a sandbox

Open the area you want - Ecosystems or Research Agent Sandboxes - and select Add new in the top right. Each page creates its own kind, so there is no type to choose.
The dialog is titled to match: Create Ecosystem or Create Research Agent Sandbox.
Enter a Name.
Set Status to Ongoing or Paused. Ongoing shows as a green chip, Paused as an orange chip. Status only drives a standard ecosystem; a sandbox shows a Test environment chip instead and its status is not used.
For a standard ecosystem only, choose how to build it:
- Create from scratch - start with an empty ecosystem.
- Create from template - copy the verticals, personas, and criteria from a ready-made template. Pick one from the Template dropdown. Research Agent Sandboxes do not offer templates.
Select Create. To back out, select Close.

The new ecosystem or sandbox appears as a card on its page. An empty area says so plainly (You don’t have any ecosystems yet, or You don’t have any research agent sandboxes yet).

Steps: read the cards

Both pages show one card per item, and the whole card opens it.

On the Ecosystems page a card carries the ecosystem name, its status chip, up to three of its vertical names as chips with +N more for the rest, and a footer counting its verticals and personas alongside when it was last updated. An ecosystem with nothing in it yet says No verticals yet - add one to start qualifying accounts. Ongoing ecosystems are listed first, so the markets you are actively working sit at the top.

On the Research Agent Sandboxes page a card carries the sandbox name, a Test environment chip, up to three of its account names as chips, and a footer counting its accounts. An empty one says No accounts yet - add one to test research agents.

Steps: change an ecosystem’s status without opening it

Select the status chip on an ecosystem card. A short dropdown opens offering Ongoing and Paused, with a checkmark against the current one. Picking the other saves immediately and the card refreshes. This is the quickest way to stand a market down or bring it back without going through the edit dialog. Sandboxes have no status to change.

Steps: edit or delete an ecosystem or sandbox

Open the menu on the right of the card.
Choose Edit to rename it or, for a standard ecosystem, change its status. Only standard ecosystems expose the Status field in the edit dialog.
Choose Delete to remove it. The confirmation asks Delete {name}?, warns that the action cannot be undone and removes any associated data, and - where it applies - tells you how many accounts will lose qualification.

Steps: add a vertical or a sandbox account

A vertical is one segment inside a standard ecosystem. A sandbox holds named accounts instead.

Open the ecosystem or sandbox by selecting its card.
For a standard ecosystem, select Add vertical in the top right. For a sandbox, open Add new and choose Account.
A stepped dialog opens. Move through it with Next, step back with Back, and leave without saving with Close.
On the first step, Vertical details (or Account details in a sandbox), fill in:
- Name - what to call this vertical or account.
- Domain - the company website. This field is for sandbox accounts, where each one is a real company.
- Status - Ongoing, Paused, or Crashed. Verticals only.
- Priority - High, Medium, Low, or Exclude. Verticals only.
- Advanced settings, a collapsed section on verticals only, holds Manual Input to Business Model Description (text that overrides the generated description), Business Model Description Length (# of Words) (a target length, 400 by default), and Notes. A banner spells out that notes are not used by the agents and do not change any output; they are only for you.
The next step, Qualification agents, lists every qualification agent in the ecosystem as a toggle. Switch on the ones that apply and enter this vertical’s expected Answer for each. This step is skipped when the ecosystem has no qualification agents.
The last step, Research agents, lists the research agents the same way. Switching one on means it collects its data for accounts in this vertical (in a sandbox, that it can be test-run against this account). You enter no answers here - the agent produces them.
Select Create on the last step to save, or Update when editing.

Setting a vertical’s answers as you create it is the same work as filling the cells in the overview table later, so a vertical can arrive fully configured rather than empty.

Steps: edit or duplicate a vertical

Open the ecosystem and stay on the Overview tab.
In the overview table, each vertical is a column header. Use the pencil icon in a vertical’s header to reopen the stepped dialog (Edit Vertical: {name}), the copy icon to duplicate it, or the trash icon to delete it. The header is the way in: the answer cells below it have their own in-place editors. See Create qualification and research criteria for those.
Duplicating opens the same stepped dialog prefilled from the original, with the name already set to the original plus (Copy) and the agent toggles matching what the source had switched on. Adjust anything you want and select Create to save it as a new vertical. Sandbox accounts duplicate the same way.

Steps: import accounts from a file

Bulk-add accounts to a Research Agent Sandbox from a spreadsheet instead of one at a time.

Open a Research Agent Sandbox, open Add new, and choose Import accounts.
The import dialog, Add Multiple Accounts to Sandbox, shows the required columns. Every file needs an Account Name column and a Domain column.
To get a starting file in the right shape, select Download example.
Drag your file onto the drop area, or select Upload to pick it. The file must be a CSV.
Select Import. A confirmation message appears when the import succeeds.

Steps: read the overview table

Open an ecosystem and look at the Overview tab. The table lays out verticals as columns and the training data as rows, so you can compare segments side by side. Each column header shows the vertical’s name, its Status and Priority chips, and its website where one is set.

Personas - the personas generated for each vertical, with a count. The Personas tab alongside the overview is where you work on them.
Qualification Agents - one row per qualification criterion, showing each vertical’s answer. Hovering a cell reveals a pencil that edits that answer in place.
Research Agents - one row per research criterion. These answers are collected by the agent rather than entered by you, so each cell shows whether the agent is switched on for that vertical - a green check for Enabled, a muted icon for Disabled - and hovering reveals a pencil to assign or unassign it.
Business model description - a generated description of each vertical’s business model, with the option to open the full text. While it is being produced, the cell reads Generating… (or Regenerating… after a change); if it fails it reads Failed to generate.
Notes - your list-building notes for each vertical.

A sandbox has no tabs and a simpler table: accounts run across the top and a single Agents group holds its research agents. Each agent row expands to show its test runs, labelled TEST 1, TEST 2 and so on, so you can compare what the agent produced across attempts, and each cell shows whether that agent is Enabled or Disabled for that account.

Steps: add an agent to an ecosystem or sandbox

You do not have to build every agent from the Agents section first. The plus icon on a Qualification Agents or Research Agents group header in the table opens a short menu:

Create new - build one from scratch, in place.
Add agent used in other ecosystems - pick from the agents already in use elsewhere in your workspace. Agents already used here are left out of the list. Choosing one opens it on its verticals step so you can say where it applies.
Add from template - browse the ready-made agents and adopt one.
Add agent from sandbox - on a Research Agents group only: take an agent you have been testing in a sandbox and copy it into this live ecosystem.

Inside a sandbox the same menu offers Create new, Add agent used in other sandboxes, Add from template, and Add agent from verticals - the mirror image, so an agent that works on a live vertical can be copied back into the sandbox to experiment with. That pairing is the point of a sandbox: draft and iterate on the copy, then promote it when it earns its place. Adding an agent this way needs access to that agent type as well as to the Agent Training Center. For everything the agent itself can be configured with, see Create agents.

What happens next

Creating or editing a vertical, including any change to its qualification or research answers, kicks off a fresh business model description for that vertical. Watch the Business model description row in the overview table: it shows Generating… or Regenerating… and settles into the finished text once done. This description feeds pain-point generation and persona mapping, so it is the thing to check after you add or change a vertical. From there you can move on to defining criteria and personas for the ecosystem.