Getting started

Key concepts: Living Knowledge, Living Memory, Living Context

Unless runs on three senses that work as one mind: Living Knowledge, Living Memory, and Living Context. Each sense has a distinct job, but they only deliver their full value when they operate together. This article explains what each sense does, how they connect to the rest of the platform, and how you can configure them to match your business.

The three senses explained

The three senses are the structural foundation of the Unless Engine, the platform that powers both the Customer Agent and the Team Assistant. You can think of them as three feeds feeding one mind: what it knows, who it’s talking to, and where it’s acting.

Living Knowledge: what the agent knows

Living Knowledge is built from your sources. It pulls from tickets, internal documentation, Slack, Confluence, Google Drive, support recordings, and website content. All of that content is continuously restructured and rewritten into one non-ambiguous, always-current library. The same library feeds three surfaces: the Customer Agent, the Team Assistant, and the Help Center. This means you get one source of truth everywhere, and documentation operations drop to near-zero because the library maintains itself from accepted drafts, overrides, and edits.

Living Memory: who the agent is talking to

Living Memory captures per-customer preferences, history, sentiment, and goals. It is private per customer and unites structured data with working memory. When a customer reaches out, the agent uses Living Memory to recall previous interactions and preferences, so the conversation feels like continuing a relationship rather than starting from scratch.

Living Context: where the agent is acting

Living Context is what the agent can do. It maintains connected awareness of your CRM, billing, subscription data, ERP systems, support tools, and custom APIs. This lets the agent understand the customer’s current situation, access relevant records, and take appropriate actions without switching between systems. Actions include resetting a password, checking an order, triggering a renewal, or firing an in-app notification at the right moment. Every procedure carries explicit permissions: what the agent can do alone, what needs a human, and what is off limits.

How the three senses work together

When a customer reaches out, the agent uses all three senses in sequence:

1. Living Knowledge to find accurate answers from your documentation
2. Living Memory to recall previous interactions and preferences
3. Living Context to see their current account status and available actions

This combination creates personalized, contextual conversations. The agent does not invent actions; it runs the procedures you have defined, with permission at every step.

Configuring Living Context connectors

Living Context connects to your technology stack through three types of connectors.

Standard connectors

Pre-built connectors for common systems include CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, helpdesks like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Jira Service Management, Zoho Desk, and Xurrent, knowledge bases like Confluence and Google Drive, live chat tools, and data lakes. You configure these with OAuth authentication and field selection through the Unless dashboard.

MCP servers

You can connect your own MCP (Model Context Protocol) server to expose internal tools, custom APIs, or proprietary data sources. The agent reads and acts through MCP the same way it does through any other connector, with the same audit trail.

Custom connectors

When a system is not on the standard list and MCP is not the right fit, you can build a custom connector using the Unless connector framework. Your developers, your account manager, or Unless Studio can scaffold one.

Key behaviors of Living Context

Living Context is read live at conversation time, not pre-synced. There is no cached copy of your CRM inside Unless. The agent queries the source when it needs the data. If a connector is slow or unavailable, the agent degrades gracefully: it still answers, just without the Living Context that connector would have provided.

Field mapping controls what the agent sees. You decide which fields are exposed, and sensitive fields can be tokenized through the Privacy Vault. The agent sees a token, not the raw value, except when answering directly to the data subject. You can inspect what a connector exposes by opening the connector and clicking Inspect.

Conclusion

Living Knowledge, Living Memory, and Living Context form the backbone of every Unless agent. Knowledge gives the agent answers, memory gives it relationship, and context gives it the ability to act. Configure them well, and your agent moves from answering questions to doing real work across the customer journey.