AI terms, in plain English.
The words you'll hear when you look at AI for your business, explained without the jargon.
- AI agent
- An AI that doesn't just answer questions but takes steps for you, like booking an appointment, updating a record or sending a follow-up, within limits you set. Custom AI agents
- AI receptionist
- An AI that answers your phone in your business's name, asks the questions your front desk asks, books or takes a message, and passes urgent calls to a person. AI receptionist
- Large language model (LLM)
- The kind of AI model behind tools like Claude and ChatGPT. It reads and writes text, and it is the 'brain' an agent uses to understand a request and decide what to do.
- RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)
- A way of making AI answer from your own documents. Your files go into a private search index; for each question the AI first finds the relevant passages, then answers from them and can show where the answer came from. Answers from your documents
- Private AI
- AI that runs on hardware you control, in your office or private cloud, so documents are never sent to an outside AI company. Private AI
- Open model
- An AI model whose files can be downloaded and run on your own hardware, such as Llama, Mistral, Qwen or Gemma. Open models are what make private AI possible.
- Integration
- A connection between the AI and one of your tools, like your calendar, CRM or accounting software, so it can read information and take actions there. Integrations
- Workflow automation
- A set of steps that runs on its own when something happens, like sending a reminder two days after a quote or filing an invoice when it arrives. Workflow automation
- Hand-off
- The moment the AI passes a conversation to a person, with everything said so far, because the request needs a human or the caller asked for one.
- Hallucination
- When an AI states something confidently that isn't true. We reduce it by having agents answer only from approved information and say when they don't know.
- Prompt
- The instructions an AI works from. For an agent, the prompt describes its job, its tone, what it may and may not do, and when to hand over.
- Business API
- The paid, commercial way companies use AI models from providers like Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI. Under their commercial terms, data sent this way isn't used to train their models by default.
- Business associate agreement (BAA)
- A contract required under HIPAA when a vendor handles patient health information for a healthcare business. We sign one, and only use services that sign one too.
- TCPA
- The US law that governs marketing calls and texts. It is why automated calls and texts should only go to people who agreed to them, with a clear way to opt out.
- AI disclosure
- Telling people they are talking to an AI. Every agent we set up says so at the start of a call or chat.
- Escalation rule
- A rule that tells the AI when to stop and involve a person, like a caller mentioning an emergency, a complaint, or a question outside its approved topics.