Short guides and plain-English AI terms.

Glossary

AI terms in plain English.

Hybrid AI

Using cloud AI for some jobs and AI you control, in a private cloud or on your own hardware, for others.

AI agents

AI software that works through a task step by step, using only the tools you've approved, while people check the important decisions.

Orchestration

Coordinating AI agents, your business systems and the people who check the work, so each step happens in the right order.

Secure links between sites

Moving data directly between your sites and your private cloud, over a route you've approved.

Private AI

AI that runs where you control who can get in and what data it sees, in a private cloud or on your own hardware.

Sovereign AI

AI where you hold the admin access, the keys and the records, approve who supports it and agree which laws apply. Hosting location alone does not establish sovereignty.

On-premises AI

AI that runs on hardware at your own premises, such as a server in your comms room.

Edge AI box

A small computer that runs an AI model at a site, so it keeps working when the internet connection drops.

Air-gapped

A system with no connection to outside networks. Data and updates move in and out through a controlled process.

Inference

Each time an AI model reads a request and writes an answer. When you rent AI, this is what you pay for, roughly by the word.

Token

A small piece of text, about three-quarters of a word. Rented AI is charged by the tokens it reads and writes.

Inference topology

The plan for where each AI job runs, what data it can see and what gets recorded.

Retrieval-augmented generation

The AI first looks up the approved documents that matter, then answers from them and shows which ones it used.

Fine-tuning

Training a model further on examples of your own work, so it uses your terms and formats and does tasks your way.

Provenance

The record of what an AI answer was based on: which documents, which model and who approved it.

Operational knowledge

The records a business runs on, such as project files, contracts, procedures and correspondence.