Core Concepts

#Purpose

Getting Started got you moving. Core Concepts is where the platform is explained properly: what each concept is, what you can do with it, and how it behaves in practice.

Opal is an agentic operations platform — it brings people, agents, knowledge, systems, and processes together into a single operational environment, rather than adding another disconnected AI tool. This section documents that environment one concept at a time, grouped so that related ideas are learned together.

There are seven entries below: one orientation page that draws the whole operating model, and six subsections, each covering one part of it. Every page is written to be read on its own, so you can work straight through the section or arrive with a single question and leave with an answer.

It is written for anyone who has finished Getting Started — from first-time users to the administrators setting the platform up. No technical background is assumed. Where something genuinely needs a developer or an administrator, the page that covers it says so plainly.

This page is the map of the section, not a lesson in any concept. It tells you what is here, how it is grouped, and where to begin.

#In This Section

• Mental Model — How the core concepts interrelate and fit into one operating model: which pieces contain which, what depends on what, and where work enters and comes out. Mental Model
• Getting Work Done — Spaces as the environment work happens in, and threads, tasks, and flows as the three ways it gets done inside them: live in conversation, running on its own, or step by step through a defined process. Getting Work Done
• Managing Knowledge — Opal's centralized knowledge base end to end: getting content in, organizing it, turning raw uploads into usable content, keeping it accurate through a governed lifecycle, and putting it to work with agents. Managing Knowledge
• Building Agents — Agents as digital workers, and the building blocks each one is assembled from: models, skills, connectors, tools, widgets, and guardrails. Building Agents
• Templates — Reusable, pre-configured starting points for creating agents, tasks, and flows, so a setup that works becomes the standard instead of something each person rediscovers. Templates
• Marketplace — How organizations list the resources they have built for others to adopt, and find and adopt resources built elsewhere — for a price or for free. Marketplace
• Organization — Your company's single tenant on Opal, and its administration: profile and preferences, members, teams, roles and security, billing and credits, org-wide configuration, and governance. Organization

#Key Concepts

The grouping follows the questions people actually ask. Each subsection answers one of them, which is usually the fastest way to find the page you need.

Start at a landing page, then go as deep as you need. Each subsection opens with its own map page — the same four sections you are reading now — introducing its concepts and recommending an order. The pages underneath go deep on one concept each, in a consistent shape: what it is, what it can do, how it works, the details worth knowing, and the related pages. Skim the shape once and you will know where to look on every page after that.

Nothing here is out of order for long. The concepts refer to each other constantly, because they are parts of one model rather than separate features. Read Mental Model first and the cross-references stop feeling like detours; read a single page cold and it will still tell you what it depends on and where that is explained.

The words mean the same thing everywhere. This documentation uses one term per idea, and every term is defined in one place: Glossary. If a page uses a word you have not met, look it up there rather than inferring it.

Some of what you read about may not be available to you. Capabilities in this section can depend on your organization's subscription plan, the role permissions you have been granted, and the permissions set on the individual resource you are working with. Each page notes where that applies; the model itself is documented once, on Access & Permissions.

This section explains; Guides apply. Core Concepts covers each concept in depth, one at a time. When you want to see several of them combine to accomplish a complete piece of work, that is what Guides is for.

#Where to Start

Start with Mental Model. It is a ten-minute read that shows how all of these concepts fit together as one operating model, and it makes every page that follows easier to place. If you would rather learn by doing, it also works well after your first hands-on session.

From there, go to the subsection that matches what you are trying to do:

• To get work done day to day — Getting Work Done. This is the layer you touch first and use most.
• To ground that work in your organization's own information — Managing Knowledge.
• To build and equip the agents that do the work — Building Agents.
• To stop rebuilding what already works — Templates, then Marketplace for what other organizations have already built.
• To set up, secure, fund, and govern the environment — Organization.

Two pages sit outside this section and are worth knowing about:

• If you have not built anything in Opal yet, the six hands-on walkthroughs in Quickstart give you a first agent, knowledge, space, thread, task, and flow to refer back to as you read.
• When you want a complete scenario end to end, Guides shows how the concepts in this section combine in real work.

Keep the Glossary to hand throughout. It is built for looking a term up, not for reading straight through.