AI & Automation Glossary
32 terms, each defined in one self-contained paragraph followed by the practical implication for a business deploying it. Definitions are linked automatically wherever the term appears across the site.
A
Agentic workflow
An agentic workflow is a business process in which one or more AI agents handle the decision points and system actions…
AI agent
An AI agent is software that receives a goal, plans the steps needed to reach it, executes those steps using external…
AI governance
AI governance is the set of policies, approvals, records and controls that determine which AI systems a business may…
B
Build vs buy
Build vs buy is the decision between developing an AI capability in-house and licensing an existing product. The…
C
Chatbot
A chatbot is a conversational interface that answers questions in natural language. Modern business chatbots are…
Context window
The context window is the maximum amount of text — measured in tokens — a model can consider in a single request…
CRM automation
CRM automation removes manual data entry and follow-up from the sales process: enriching records, logging activity…
D
Deflection rate
Deflection rate is the share of support contacts fully resolved by automation without a human agent. It is the primary…
E
Embedding
An embedding is a list of numbers representing the meaning of a piece of text, produced by a model so that semantically…
Evaluation
Evaluation is the systematic scoring of AI output against a fixed set of test cases with known good answers. It is what…
F
Fine-tuning
Fine-tuning further trains an existing model on your own examples so it adopts a specific format, tone or…
G
Generative engine optimisation
Generative engine optimisation is the practice of structuring content so AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Gemini…
Guardrails
Guardrails are the technical constraints that stop an AI system from acting outside its permitted scope — allowed…
H
Hallucination
A hallucination is a confident, fluent model output that is factually wrong or fabricated. It is a structural property…
Human in the loop
Human in the loop means a person reviews or approves AI output before it takes effect. It is the standard control for…
I
Inference
Inference is the act of running a trained model to produce an output. In business terms it is the recurring per-request…
L
Large language model
A large language model is a neural network trained on very large text corpora to predict the next token in a sequence…
Lead scoring
Lead scoring ranks inbound prospects by likelihood to buy, using firmographic fit and behavioural signals. AI improves…
O
Orchestration
Orchestration is the coordination layer that decides which model, tool or sub-process handles each step of a task…
P
Process mapping
Process mapping documents each step, decision, system and handoff in a business process before automating it. It is the…
Prompt engineering
Prompt engineering is the practice of structuring the instructions, context and examples given to a language model so…
Prompt injection
Prompt injection is an attack in which malicious instructions hidden in content the model reads — a web page, an email…
Proof of concept
A proof of concept is a time-boxed build that tests whether an AI approach can meet a defined success threshold on real…
R
Retrieval-augmented generation
Retrieval-augmented generation is a pattern where relevant documents are fetched from a knowledge base at query time…
Return on investment
Return on investment for AI automation is the net benefit — labour hours recovered, revenue gained, error cost avoided…
S
Structured data
Structured data is machine-readable markup — usually JSON-LD following schema.org — that states explicitly what a page…
T
Token
A token is the unit of text a language model processes — roughly three-quarters of an English word. Model pricing…
Topic cluster
A topic cluster is a pillar page covering a broad subject plus a set of child pages covering its sub-questions, all…
Topical authority
Topical authority is the degree to which a site is treated as a credible source across an entire subject area rather…
Total cost of ownership
Total cost of ownership is the full lifetime cost of an AI system: implementation, model and infrastructure spend…
V
Vector database
A vector database stores text (or images) as numeric embeddings and retrieves items by semantic similarity rather than…
W
Workflow automation
Workflow automation is the use of software to move work between systems and people without manual re-entry — triggers…