Glossary
The vocabulary, defined plainly.
The terms that come up around production AI and go-to-market, each in one clear sentence, no jargon defending itself with more jargon.
- AI SDR
- An AI system that does a sales-development rep's job end to end (researching the account, finding the angle, writing and sending outreach, and following up) rather than a tool a human rep operates.
- AI GTM engine
- An autonomous go-to-market system that runs outbound from first contact to booked meeting, so the motion no longer depends on a person working each account by hand.
- AI governance
- The controls, records, and evidence that let an organization account for how an AI system decides and behaves, so that when a regulator, customer, or board asks, there is an answer.
- Production-grade AI
- An AI system engineered to run unattended under real data, real volume, and real edge cases, with observability and rollback built in, the opposite of a demo that works once.
- The last 80 percent
- The load-bearing work a prototype skips: validation, retries, permissions, escalation paths, observability, and rollback. It is where most enterprise AI fails to reach production.
- Observability
- The ability to see what a system is actually doing in production (its inputs, decisions, failures, and rollbacks) as they happen, rather than reconstructing them after an incident.
- Human override
- A guarantee that every action an AI system takes is logged, reversible, and pausable by a person at any time.
- SOC 2
- An auditing standard for how a company manages customer data across five trust criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.
- ISO/IEC 42001
- The international standard for an AI management system: how an organization governs the AI it builds and operates, from risk to accountability.
- EU AI Act
- The European Union's regulation that classifies AI systems by risk and attaches obligations that scale with that risk, from transparency duties to strict requirements for high-risk uses.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- Writing and structuring content so AI answer engines can quote it accurately, a superset of SEO, aimed at machines that summarize rather than just rank.
- White-label partnership
- An arrangement where a partner sells a provider's product under their own brand while the provider powers the technology invisibly; the product and the customer relationship stay the partner's.