Entities
The business objects conversations are about, and the unit access control and aggregation hang off.
Conversations are always about something: a customer, an opportunity, a quote, a case, a supplier, a project. Entities make that explicit and durable, so context can be governed, aggregated and acted on rather than left in a transcript.
An entity is the stable object that persists. A conversation is the time-bound evidence that enriches it.
What they represent
Whatever your organization runs on. Common ones are customers and accounts, opportunities and deals, quotes and orders, service cases, suppliers, and projects. Anything that needs continuity across conversations is a candidate.
An entity is defined once, with its own fields, and then filled with records. One entity, many records: one patient, one account, one site.
Why they matter
Conversations attach to them. Anchoring a conversation to an entity is what stops the context being trapped in a single transcript, and what lets the next person pick it up.
Access is granted at their level. In most organizations the practical question is whether this person should see this account. Entities and their records are where that is enforced, and access to a record carries through to the conversations, signals and summaries attached to it.
Intelligence aggregates at their level. What changed, what is at risk, what was committed: all of it rolls up per record, and from there by type, owner, region or segment.
What makes an entity work
A stable identity, so the same account is the same account across systems. Linkability, so many conversations and outputs can attach to it. Governance as a property rather than an afterthought, meaning access checks, audit and retention. Enough continuity support to assemble a current state of play. And clean aggregation, so roll-ups do not lose meaning.
Aggregating
Once intelligence is anchored to records, it can be grouped without going vague: by entity type, by who owns it, by region or business unit, by segment or portfolio. That serves both the operational use, meaning queues and prioritisation, and the analytical use, meaning trends and where risk is concentrated.
Where this lives in the product
Entities and their records are defined in the console under Entities and records, including their fields, bulk import and per-record access. On the phone they are the Entities tab, and a record is the launchpad for field work. Which records a given person sees is covered in Who can see a record.