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This walkthrough takes you from an empty Canvas to a published template that your agents can call. We’ll build a short opportunity brief that takes a deal name, current stage, and the last meeting summary, and produces a three-paragraph readout.

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Before you start

  • You’re signed in to Deal Brain and have at least one connected source integration (HubSpot, Salesforce, Gmail, Gong, Fathom, or Granola) and at least one visible opportunity.
  • You’re on a plan that includes template authoring (every plan does).

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Open Canvas

Navigate to Dashboard → Canvas. You’ll see the Canvas home: a grid of templates organized by scope (System presets at the top, then your Organization’s templates, then your personal drafts). The page also exposes two entry points for authoring: Generate from natural language and Start from scratch.
Canvas home — template grid + authoring entry points

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Author a new template

1

Generate a draft from natural language

Click Generate template. Describe what you want the template to produce — for this walkthrough:
A three-paragraph opportunity brief. The first paragraph names the deal, account, and current stage. The second summarizes the most recent meeting. The third lists next-step action items.
Submit. Canvas drafts a template body for you. You’ll land in the editor with the draft loaded as a Draft scoped to User (only you can see it).
Prefer to build from scratch? Click Start from scratch instead. You’ll get a blank document, a heading block, and a paragraph block.
2

Set the title and description

At the top of the editor, give the template a clear name and a one-line description. Name → Opportunity readout (3-paragraph). Description → Three-paragraph brief covering deal context, last meeting, and next steps.The name appears in list_templates and the description gives your agents the context they need to pick this template over another.
3

Add data variables

Place your cursor where you want a value injected. Press # to open the variable picker, then choose the variable you want — for example opportunity name, account name, current stage, last meeting summary.Variables render in the editor as blue chips. At render time they’re replaced with real values from the bound opportunity.See Variables for the full catalog and the difference between data and instruction variables.
4

Add an instruction

Inside your second paragraph block, press # and pick Instruction. Type the directive to the model — for example: “Summarize the meeting transcript in two sentences. Do not invent participants or topics not in the transcript.”Instructions are model directives, not data. They steer the LLM during render without appearing literally in the output.
5

Preview against a real opportunity

Click Preview. A modal opens with an opportunity picker — choose any visible deal. Canvas binds the deal’s data into your data variables and renders the template. You see the actual output your agent would produce, against real data.Iterate: tweak instructions, reorder paragraphs, add or remove variables, preview again.
Preview is read-only and doesn’t persist anything. Edits in preview are not saved back to your template.
6

Publish

When the preview looks right, change Status from Draft to Active. Click Save.Your template is now visible to agents. Any AI agent connected to your Deal Brain MCP server can call list_templates to see it, and generate_template to render it.

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What just happened

You authored a reusable AI primitive. Two things changed under the hood:
  1. A row in your organization’s template store, with your template’s content, status, and scope.
  2. A new entry in your agent’s list_templates result. Calling generate_template with your template’s key returns the system prompt and the rendered content, ready to be sent to a model.
You can call your template from anywhere Deal Brain’s MCP server is connected — Claude Desktop, Cursor, ChatGPT, or any internal agent your team built that speaks MCP. See Building on Canvas for the developer-side surface.

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Next steps

Understand the model

Templates, blocks, variables, scope, status — the full mental model.

Dig into variables

Data variables, instruction variables, and the variable catalog.

Manage publication

Draft → Active workflow, scope precedence, and deletion rules.

Call it from an agent

generate_template and list_templates over MCP.