Live data - Information your agent retrieves in real time by reaching out to an external source. APIs and web scrapes produce live data. It reflects what exists right now, but has no memory of what came before.
Stored data - Information previously saved to a knowledge base, whether by you, a teammate, or the agent itself on a prior run. Stored data gives an agent context and memory, enabling it to detect what has changed over time.
Knowledge base - Any location where your agent reads pre-existing information. This includes documents your team created (brand guidelines, templates, messaging frameworks) as well as outputs the agent saved from previous runs (e.g., a Google Sheet snapshot of last week's competitor pricing).
The baseline slides forward with each run. The infrastructure can be as simple as a single Google Sheet cell that gets read at the start and overwritten at the end.
An agent with only live data can tell you what is there. An agent that combines live and stored data can tell you what changed - and the change is almost always the thing worth knowing.
Live data - Information your agent retrieves in real time by reaching out to an external source. APIs and web scrapes produce live data. It reflects what exists right now, but has no memory of what came before.
Stored data - Information previously saved to a knowledge base, whether by you, a teammate, or the agent itself on a prior run. Stored data gives an agent context and memory, enabling it to detect what has changed over time.
Knowledge base - Any location where your agent reads pre-existing information. This includes documents your team created (brand guidelines, templates, messaging frameworks) as well as outputs the agent saved from previous runs (e.g., a Google Sheet snapshot of last week's competitor pricing).
The baseline slides forward with each run. The infrastructure can be as simple as a single Google Sheet cell that gets read at the start and overwritten at the end.
An agent with only live data can tell you what is there. An agent that combines live and stored data can tell you what changed - and the change is almost always the thing worth knowing.
