Glossary
AI & Automation Glossary
Key terms and concepts explained clearly for business leaders and technical teams alike.
AI Agents
Autonomous software programs powered by artificial intelligence that can perceive their environment, make decisions, and take actions to accomplish specific goals.
API Integration
The process of connecting different software applications through their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to enable data exchange and coordinated functionality.
Business Process Automation (BPA)
The strategic use of technology to automate complex business processes and functions beyond simple individual tasks.
Conversational AI
Technology that enables machines to engage in human-like dialogue, understanding natural language input and generating contextually appropriate responses.
Data Pipeline
An automated series of steps that move and transform data from one or more sources to a destination system for storage, analysis, or further processing.
ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)
A data integration pattern that extracts data from source systems, transforms it into a suitable format, and loads it into a target system such as a data warehouse.
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)
The use of AI technologies — including OCR, NLP, and machine learning — to automatically extract, classify, and process data from unstructured documents.
Large Language Model (LLM)
A large language model (LLM) is a neural network trained on very large text collections to predict the next token, which lets it understand and generate human language for tasks like answering, summarizing and drafting.
MLOps (Machine Learning Operations)
A set of practices that combines machine learning, DevOps, and data engineering to deploy, monitor, and maintain ML models in production reliably and efficiently.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, introduced by Anthropic in November 2024, that lets AI applications connect to tools and data sources through one common protocol instead of custom integrations.
n8n
n8n is a node-based workflow automation platform, source-available under a fair-code license, that connects apps and services through visual workflows and includes an AI Agent node for building LLM-driven automations.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique where a system first retrieves relevant passages from your own documents, then has a large language model answer using only those passages, so responses stay grounded in your data.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
A technology that uses software robots to mimic human interactions with digital systems, automating rule-based tasks across applications.
Vector Database
A vector database stores embeddings, numeric vectors that capture the meaning of text or other data, and returns the nearest neighbors to a query by similarity using approximate nearest neighbor search.
Webhook
A webhook is an HTTP callback: when something happens in one system, it sends the event data as a POST request to a URL you provide, so you receive updates instead of repeatedly polling for them.
Workflow Automation
The use of technology to automate repeatable business processes, reducing manual intervention and ensuring tasks are completed consistently and efficiently.
Past the definitions
Knowing the terms is the easy part. If you want this built for your business, start with what an AI workspace actually is, then see how I build automation and what it costs in 2026.