AI Terminology
The AI landscape is full of jargon. This hub collects clear, practical definitions of the AI terminology that business leaders and strategists need to understand — without the hype. Each article explains what a concept is, why it matters, and when to use it.
What is AI memory?
AI memory is the emerging set of techniques that let AI systems remember who you are, what you've told them, and how you work, across conversations, sessions, and tools. Most organizations are only using two of its five layers.
What Is an AI Persona?
An AI persona is the deliberately designed personality and emotional character of an AI system. It is not cosmetic; it causally drives behavior and adoption.
What Is Shadow AI?
Shadow AI is the unsanctioned use of AI tools by employees without IT approval or security review — the 2026 evolution of shadow IT that's faster, harder to detect, and significantly more dangerous.
What Is AI Fluency?
AI fluency goes beyond knowing what AI can do — it's the ability to independently apply AI tools to drive measurable results. Only 5% of workers have it. Here's why it matters.
What Is an Agent Harness?
If the AI model is the brain, the harness is the body — the infrastructure layer that connects thinking to doing, and the make-or-break factor for agents in production.
What Is Computer Use?
Computer Use is the AI capability to see, interpret, and interact with computer screens like a human — clicking buttons, filling forms, and navigating applications without needing APIs or custom integrations.
What Is Model Routing?
Model routing is the practice of directing different tasks to different AI models based on problem nature, required capability, cost, speed, and quality requirements.
What Are Evals?
This Week's Term: Evals - structured tests that measure whether an AI system is performing to your standards, consistently and over time.
What Are MCP Apps?
In Issue #12, I introduced term MCP - the open standard that acts as a "USB-C port for AI," letting AI models connect to external tools and data sources through a universal interface. Since then, MCP has grown rapidly.
What Is AI Orchestration?
This Week's Term: Orchestration - the coordination of multiple AI agents, tools, or capabilities to accomplish complex tasks that no single component could handle alone.
What Is an AI Moat?
A sustainable competitive advantage that protects a business from competitors, borrowed from the defensive trenches around medieval castles.
What Are Centaur Teams?
This Week's Term: Centaur Teams - human-AI partnerships that combine human judgment with AI computational power, named after the mythological creature that was half-human, half-horse.
What Is AI Inference?
This Week's Term: AI Inference - the process of running a trained AI model on real-time data to generate predictions, answers, or outputs. If training is learning, inference is putting that learning into practice.
What Is AI Slop?
This Week's Term: AI Slop - digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.
What Is MCP (Model Context Protocol)?
This Week's Term: Model Context Protocol (MCP) - an open standard that enables AI assistants to connect with external data sources and tools through a universal interface, allowing applications to provide context to ...
What Is Interpretability vs. Utility?
This Week's Term: Interpretability vs.
What Are AI Agents? The Five Levels
AI Agents are autonomous AI systems that can reason about problems, decide which tools to use, take actions across multiple steps, and iterate on their work without human intervention at each decision point, moving be...
What Is Multimodal AI?
This Week's Term: Multimodal AI - AI systems that can understand and generate content across multiple types of input and output: text, images, audio, video, and code, processing them together rather than in isolation.
What Is Synthetic Data?
What it means: Synthetic data is artificially generated information that mimics the statistical properties and patterns of real-world data, but doesn't contain any actual observations from reality.
What Is Context Engineering?
This Week's Term: Context Engineering - the practice of deliberately structuring, curating, and providing the right information to AI systems to maximize output quality, accuracy, and relevance.
What Is Vibe Coding?
Vibe coding is software development where AI generates most or all of the code based on high-level descriptions or prompts - it's all about the vibe, not the implementation details.
What Is an AI Hallucination?
This Week's Term: AI Hallucination - when an AI model confidently generates false information that sounds plausible but has no basis in reality, essentially making things up rather than admitting uncertainty.
What Is Few-Shot Prompting?
This Week's Term: Few-shot prompting - the technique of providing AI with 2-5 examples of desired output before asking it to generate new content, enabling the model to learn the pattern and apply it to similar tasks.
What Is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)?
This Week's Term: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) - an AI architecture that combines large language models with dynamic information retrieval, allowing models to fetch relevant documents or data before generating...
What Is Human-in-the-Loop (HITL)?
This Week's Term: Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) - a design pattern where AI systems operate with ongoing human oversight, intervention, or validation at critical decision points rather than running fully autonomously.
What Is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
This Week's Term: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) - the practice of optimizing content to appear in AI-powered answer summaries across ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and other LLMs.