# Rudder Lookout Key Concepts


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This guide covers some key concepts and terminologies of Rudder Lookout that are referenced throughout the documentation.

## Workspace

A **workspace** is how your team works together in Lookout. It is the container for everything your team builds — audiences, activations, chats, dashboards, warehouse connections, and Context Hub notes — and it is the unit that decides who can see and change what.

Note that:

- Each workspace has a short, URL-friendly name (its **slug**) that appears in every link.
- All resources live inside exactly one workspace, and the workspace decides which warehouses, RudderStack account, and repositories the team's chats can reach. 
- A single person can belong to several workspaces and switch between them by navigating to a different workspace URL.

See [Workspaces and Collaboration]({{< ref "lookout/workspaces/" >}}) for roles and sharing.

## The agent

The **Lookout agent** is a conversational assistant that works across your data stack. It can read your warehouse, build and refine audiences, draft dashboards and documentation, read your code repositories for context, and inspect your RudderStack sources, destinations, transformations, and Tracking Plans — without making changes to your control plane account.

Two design rules keep it trustworthy:

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See [How to Work with Rudder Lookout]({{< ref "lookout/working-with-lookout/" >}}) and [Security and Data Handling]({{< ref "lookout/security.md" >}}) for more details.

## Audience

An **audience** is a saved definition of who belongs in a segment — a set of rules over your warehouse data, such as *bought more than twice in the last 90 days and lives in India*.

An audience stores the **definition**, not a list of people. Its **size** is measured by running the definition against your warehouse, so it reflects your data as it is now rather than as it was when the audience was written.

You create an audience by describing it to the agent, then adjust it yourself. See [Audiences and Activation]({{< ref "lookout/audiences/" >}}) for more details.

## Activation

An **activation** is a live sync that sends an audience to a destination and keeps it current there. One audience can have several destinations — the same segment can feed an ad platform and a messaging tool at once.

The destinations available are the ones configured in the RudderStack workspace your Lookout workspace is linked to. Activating is always an explicit action you take, never something the agent does on its own.

## Artifacts

Lookout's value is not the chat itself — it is what the chat produces. Every meaningful result is saved as a **durable artifact** your team can revisit, share, or hand to a teammate:

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## Integrations

An **integration** plugs a real tool into the agent. Each connected system gives the agent a specific set of abilities, and the agent can only touch a system when that integration is configured for your workspace. See [Integrations]({{< ref "lookout/integrations/_index.md" >}}) for setup details.

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## Roles

Access within a workspace follows clear roles — **Owner**, **Admin**, and **Member**.

Every member can chat, build audiences and dashboards, and read documentation, while administrative actions like connecting a warehouse or managing members are reserved for owners and admins. 

See [Roles and Permissions]({{< ref "lookout/workspaces/roles.md" >}}) for more details.

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