The Terms You'll Actually Hear
Large Language Model (LLM)
This is the brain of the AI. It's software trained on a ton of text data to understand language and predict the next word in a sequence. GPT-4, Claude, Gemini — those are all LLMs. You don't need to know how they work. You need to know they're the foundation of most AI assistants.
AI Agent
This is what we build. An agent is an AI that can take actions — read emails, pull data from your systems, write documents, make decisions. It's not a chatbot. It's a worker that operates on your behalf.
Prompt
This is the instruction you give the AI. "Read these emails and flag the urgent ones." That's a prompt. The quality of your prompt determines the quality of the output. Garbage in, garbage out.
Fine-Tuning
This means training an AI on your specific data so it gets better at your specific task. "Here are 100 examples of customer emails. Learn how we categorize them." Some tasks need fine-tuning. Most don't.
Hallucination
This is when an AI makes stuff up. It sounds confident, but it's wrong. "What's your customer's phone number?" The AI makes up a number because it was trained on patterns but doesn't actually have your customer data. This is why you need guardrails.
Integration
This is connecting your AI to your other systems. Your agent lives somewhere. But it needs to read your email, pull data from your CRM, update your database. Integrations are how it does that.
Workflow Automation
Taking a process that humans do step-by-step and having an AI do it instead. It's not magic. It's just: instead of a person doing steps 1, 2, 3, the AI does them automatically.
The Stuff You Don't Need to Know
Machine learning, neural networks, transformer architecture, tokenization, embedding vectors, retrieval-augmented generation — all real concepts, all completely unnecessary for you to understand. If someone is explaining these to you unsolicited, they're either trying to impress you or they're in the wrong business.
If it doesn't directly impact your decision about whether to implement something, ignore it.
The One Concept That Matters
Understand the difference between a tool and a system. A tool is something someone uses — like ChatGPT. You open it up, you ask it something, you get an answer. A system is something that runs on your behalf without someone asking it to start — like our agents. They run constantly, they take actions, they integrate with your business.
Most of what you'll hear about AI in the business world is about tools. Most of what matters for your business is systems. That distinction matters.