The AI agent glossary.
647 terms for agents, orchestration, models, retrieval, evaluation, and infrastructure. Plain definitions, A to Z. Nothing here is a ranking, a legal opinion, or a quote.
647 terms
A
A/B test
An A/B test is an experiment that compares two versions of a system, such as two prompts or models, by exposing different groups of users to each and measuring which performs better on chosen metrics.
Acceptable use policy
An acceptable use policy is a set of rules defining how an AI service or tool may and may not be used, prohibiting activities such as generating illegal content or attempting to bypass safeguards.
Accessibility tree
An accessibility tree is a structured representation of a page or application interface, listing elements with their roles, names and states, which browser and computer-use agents often read instead of raw pixels or HTML.
Action space
An action space is the full set of actions an agent is allowed to take in its environment, such as the tools it can call, the commands it can run or the interface elements it can click.
Activation function
An activation function is a mathematical function applied to a neuron's output that introduces nonlinearity, allowing a neural network to learn complex relationships rather than only straight-line ones.
Actor model
The actor model is a concurrency model in which independent actors hold private state and communicate only by sending asynchronous messages, a design often used to run many agents at once.
Adam
Adam is a popular optimization algorithm that adapts the learning rate for each parameter using running averages of past gradients and their squares. It is widely used to train deep neural networks.
Adapter
An adapter is a small set of trainable layers or weights inserted into or attached to a frozen pretrained model, letting it learn a new task without retraining the full network.
Adversarial example
An adversarial example is an input deliberately altered, often in ways humans barely notice, to cause an AI model to make a wrong prediction or produce an unintended output.
Agent communication language
An agent communication language is a formal language for messages between software agents, defining message types such as request, inform or propose along with their meaning, as in the classic FIPA ACL and KQML standards.
Agent discovery
Agent discovery is the mechanism by which agents find other agents or services able to perform a task, typically by querying a registry or reading published descriptions of their capabilities.
Agent environment
An agent environment is everything an agent can perceive and act upon, such as a file system, a browser, a set of APIs or a simulated world, which returns observations in response to its actions.
Agent framework
An agent framework is a software library that provides ready-made building blocks for agents, such as model connectors, tool definitions, memory, planning and multi-agent coordination, so developers do not build them from scratch.
Agent harness
An agent harness is the software surrounding a model that turns it into a working agent, handling the loop, tool execution, context management, permissions and state so the model can act over many steps.
Agent loop
An agent loop is the repeating cycle that drives an AI agent: the model decides on an action, the action is executed, the result is fed back, and the cycle continues until a stop condition is reached.
Agent memory
Agent memory is the set of mechanisms that let an AI agent retain and recall information across steps or sessions, such as conversation history, stored facts, user preferences and past outcomes.
Agent orchestration
Agent orchestration is the coordination of one or more AI agents, tools and processes so they work together on a larger task, covering who does what, in which order, with which data and under which controls.
Agent runtime
An agent runtime is the execution environment that hosts running agents, managing their processes, tool access, state, resource limits and communication while they carry out tasks.
Agent SDK
An agent SDK is a software development kit, usually published by a model provider, that gives developers libraries and APIs for building agents that call tools, manage context and run multi-step tasks.
Agent skill
An agent skill is a packaged set of instructions, scripts and reference files that an agent can load when a task calls for it, giving it specialized know-how without keeping everything in its context.
Agent state
Agent state is the information an agent keeps while working on a task, such as the conversation so far, intermediate results, plans and variables, which determines what it knows at each step.
Agent swarm
An agent swarm is a group of many relatively simple agents that coordinate through local interactions or lightweight handoffs rather than a single central controller, to complete tasks collectively.
Agent team
An agent team is a group of AI agents organized to work together on a shared objective, typically with defined roles, communication rules and a way of merging their outputs.
Agent trajectory
An agent trajectory is the complete recorded sequence of an agent's reasoning, actions and observations during a task, used for debugging, evaluation and training.
Agent-computer interface
An agent-computer interface is the set of commands, tools and output formats through which a language model agent interacts with a computer, designed around the model's strengths rather than those of a human user.
Agent2Agent protocol
The Agent2Agent protocol is an open protocol, originally introduced by Google, that lets AI agents built on different frameworks discover each other, exchange messages and collaborate on tasks.
Agentic AI
Agentic AI is a broad term for AI systems designed to act toward goals with some autonomy, planning steps, using tools and adapting to results, rather than only producing a single response to a prompt.
Agentic OS
An agentic OS is an AI operating system whose agents are allowed to act, and whose memory keeps the constraint after they act. The category name is agentic OS. The product name is Agentik. A person still approves before anything is published, sent, or written to a customer record.
Agentic RAG
Agentic RAG is a form of retrieval-augmented generation in which an AI agent decides when and what to retrieve, can reformulate queries and choose among sources, and iterates until it has enough information.
Agentic workflow
An agentic workflow is a process in which language models do more than answer once, taking several steps that may include planning, tool use, checking results and revising work toward a goal.
AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md is an open convention for a Markdown file placed in a code repository that gives coding agents project-specific instructions, such as build commands, test procedures and coding conventions.
AI accelerator
An AI accelerator is any specialized hardware designed to speed up machine learning computations, including GPUs, TPUs, NPUs and custom chips, offering better performance or efficiency than general-purpose processors.
AI agent
An AI agent is a worker that can use tools. An operating system is what assigns the work, keeps the memory, and puts a human on the gate. A company that searches for AI agents usually needs the system, not another bot that forgets the last decision.
AI audit
An AI audit is an independent or internal examination of an AI system's design, data, performance and controls to check that it meets legal, ethical and organizational requirements.
AI coding assistant
An AI coding assistant is a tool that helps programmers write code through suggestions, completions, explanations and chat inside an editor, typically acting on request rather than carrying out long tasks on its own.
AI copilot
An AI copilot is an assistant embedded in an application that works alongside a person, suggesting content, answering questions and carrying out requested actions while the person stays in control of decisions.
AI gateway
An AI gateway is a proxy between applications and model providers that centralizes access to multiple models, adding features such as key management, routing, fallbacks, caching, cost tracking and logging.
AI governance
AI governance, here, means a person approves before an agent publishes, sends, or writes to a customer record. Agentik does not publish a legal timetable and does not administer any regulation. A catalog entry is not consent. A compile is not a release.
AI impact assessment
An AI impact assessment is a structured review carried out before or during deployment to identify how an AI system could affect people's rights, safety and wellbeing, and to plan mitigations.
AI implementation
AI implementation, here, is the on-demand sequence for one company: audit and brief, connect the tools, map the gap, then a plan and a roadmap. It is not a platform evaluation. The company is paid against the return it can show, not against the clock, and this page is not a quote.
AI operating system
An AI operating system is a set of specialized agents, shared memory, approvals, and skills that a company installs on the host it already pays. Agentik is that system. It is not a chatbot, and it is not a PC operating system. The host runs the model. Agentik never buys the tokens.
AI safety
AI safety is the field concerned with preventing AI systems from causing accidental or deliberate harm, covering research on alignment, robustness, misuse prevention, monitoring and the control of increasingly capable models.
AI watermarking
AI watermarking is the embedding of a hidden, detectable signal into AI-generated text, images, audio or video so the content can later be identified as machine-generated.
Air-gapped deployment
An air-gapped deployment is a system physically or logically isolated from the internet and other networks, used for highly sensitive AI workloads where no data may leave the environment.
Alignment
Alignment is the effort to make AI systems pursue the goals and values their designers and users intend, behaving helpfully and honestly while avoiding harmful or unintended behavior.
Anonymization
Anonymization is the irreversible removal or transformation of identifying details in data so individuals can no longer be identified, unlike pseudonymization, which replaces identifiers with codes that can be reversed using separately stored information.
API gateway
An API gateway is a service that sits in front of backend APIs and handles common tasks such as authentication, routing, rate limiting, logging and request transformation in one place.
API key
An API key is a secret string that identifies and authenticates an application when it calls an API, and it must be stored securely because anyone holding it can use the associated account.
API rate limit
An API rate limit is a cap on how many requests or tokens a client can send to a service within a time window, protecting capacity and enforcing fair use, with excess requests typically rejected.
Approximate nearest neighbor
Approximate nearest neighbor search is a family of algorithms that find vectors very close to a query much faster than exact search, accepting that a few true nearest neighbors may be missed.
Artificial general intelligence
Artificial general intelligence is a hypothetical AI system able to understand, learn, and perform nearly any intellectual task a human can, across domains, rather than excelling only at narrow tasks.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the field of computer science focused on building systems that perform tasks usually associated with human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognizing images, reasoning, and making decisions.
Artificial neuron
An artificial neuron is the basic unit of a neural network. It multiplies its inputs by weights, adds a bias, and passes the result through an activation function to produce an output.
Asynchronous execution
Asynchronous execution is running a task without making the caller wait for it to finish, so other work can continue and the result is delivered later through a callback, event or status check.
At-least-once delivery
At-least-once delivery is a messaging guarantee that every message will be delivered one or more times, never lost but possibly duplicated, so consumers should handle messages idempotently.
Attention mechanism
An attention mechanism is a neural network component that lets a model weigh how relevant each part of its input is to every other part when building its representation of the data.
Audit log
An audit log is a chronological, tamper-resistant record of actions taken in a system, such as who or which agent accessed data, changed settings or triggered operations, used for security reviews and compliance.
Autoencoder
An autoencoder is a neural network trained to compress its input into a smaller representation and then reconstruct the original from it, learning useful features without labels.
AutoGen
AutoGen is an open-source framework from Microsoft for building multi-agent applications in which several language model agents, tools and humans converse with each other to complete tasks.
AutoGPT
AutoGPT is an open-source project that became one of the first widely known autonomous agent experiments, having a GPT model break a user goal into tasks and pursue them in a loop with tools.
Autonomous agent
An autonomous agent is an AI system that pursues a goal over multiple steps with little human input, deciding on its own which actions to take, observing the results and adjusting until the task is done or it stops.
Autonomy level
An autonomy level describes how much an agent may do without human involvement, ranging from only suggesting actions, to acting with approval, to acting independently within defined limits.
Autoregressive model
An autoregressive model generates a sequence one element at a time, with each new element predicted from the ones produced before it. Most text-generating language models work this way.
Autoscaling
Autoscaling is automatically adding or removing compute resources, such as GPU instances, based on demand, so a system handles traffic spikes without paying for idle capacity.
B
BabyAGI
BabyAGI is a small open-source agent script that repeatedly creates, prioritizes and executes tasks toward an objective using a language model, and it was an early demonstration of task-driven autonomous agents.
Background agent
A background agent is an agent that runs asynchronously without a person watching each step, often triggered by events or schedules, and reports results or asks for input only when needed.
Backpressure
Backpressure is a mechanism by which a slower downstream component signals upstream components to slow down or pause, preventing queues from growing without limit when work arrives faster than it can be processed.
Backpropagation
Backpropagation is the algorithm that computes how much each weight in a neural network contributed to the error, by applying the chain rule backward from the output layer to the input layer.
Base model
A base model is a language model after pretraining but before instruction tuning or alignment. It continues text well but does not reliably follow instructions or hold a conversation.
Batch inference
Batch inference is running a model on a large set of inputs as a background job rather than in real time, typically at lower cost, used when results are not needed immediately.
Batch size
Batch size is the number of training examples processed together before the model's parameters are updated. It affects training speed, memory use, and the stability of learning.
Batching
Batching is the technique of grouping multiple inputs or requests and processing them together on hardware such as a GPU, improving throughput and cost efficiency at the price of some added latency.
BDI architecture
BDI architecture is a classic agent design that models an agent through its beliefs about the world, its desires or goals, and its intentions, the plans it has committed to carrying out.
Beam search
Beam search is a decoding strategy that keeps several of the most promising partial sequences at each step and extends them in parallel, choosing the highest-scoring complete sequence at the end.
Benchmark
A benchmark is a standardized dataset and scoring method used to compare AI models on the same task, such as reasoning, coding or knowledge questions, so results can be reported consistently across models and versions.
BERT
BERT is an encoder-only transformer language model introduced by Google that reads text in both directions at once. It is widely used for classification, search, and other language understanding tasks.
Bi-encoder
A bi-encoder is a retrieval model that encodes queries and documents separately into embeddings, so document vectors can be precomputed and compared quickly with any query at search time.
Bias
Bias in AI is a systematic skew in a model's outputs that unfairly favors or disadvantages certain groups or viewpoints, often inherited from unrepresentative training data or flawed design choices.
Bias-variance tradeoff
The bias-variance tradeoff describes the tension between a model that is too simple and makes systematic errors, and one that is too sensitive to its training data and fails to generalize.
Blackboard architecture
Blackboard architecture is a design in which multiple specialized agents collaborate by reading from and writing to a shared workspace, the blackboard, each contributing when it can advance the solution.
BLEU
BLEU is an automatic metric that scores machine-generated text, originally translations, by measuring how many word sequences it shares with one or more human reference texts.
Blue-green deployment
A blue-green deployment is a release strategy that runs two identical production environments and switches traffic from the current one to the new one at once, so rollback is a quick switch back.
BM25
BM25 is a widely used ranking function for keyword search that scores documents by query term frequency and rarity, while adjusting for document length and limiting the effect of repeated terms.
Brand voice
Brand voice is the constraint on what a company sounds like and what it must not claim. In Content OS it lives in the brief, not in the last chat message. A person still approves before a piece leaves. The agent does not get to invent a metric or a promise.
Browser agent
A browser agent is an AI agent that completes tasks on websites by navigating pages, reading content, filling in forms and clicking elements inside a web browser on a user's behalf.
Browser automation
Browser automation is the programmatic control of a web browser to load pages, interact with elements and extract data, often through a headless browser, and it is a common tool layer beneath browser agents.
Byte pair encoding
Byte pair encoding is a tokenization method that starts from individual characters or bytes and repeatedly merges the most frequent adjacent pairs into new tokens, building a vocabulary of common subwords.
C
Calibration
Calibration is how closely a model's stated confidence matches its actual accuracy, so a well-calibrated model that reports 80 percent confidence on a set of answers is right about 80 percent of the time.
Canary deployment
A canary deployment is a release strategy that sends a small share of traffic to a new version first, monitoring its behavior before gradually rolling it out to everyone.
Cancellation
Cancellation is the controlled stopping of a running task or workflow at a person's or system's request, ideally releasing resources and leaving partial work in a consistent state.