A little clarity goes a long way.

The vocabulary

In plain English.

Hybrid AI

AI that combines cloud services with private or local processing. Each workload runs in the environment that suits its data, performance and control requirements.

AI agents

Software that uses AI to interpret a task, use approved tools and take steps towards an outcome, with people reviewing important decisions.

Orchestration

Coordinating agents, business systems and human review so tasks happen in the right order and information reaches the right place.

Sovereign point-to-point data transfer

Moving data between approved endpoints through routes and infrastructure chosen to meet the required location, access and operational controls.

Private AI

AI workloads that run in an environment with defined access and data controls, using private cloud or local infrastructure.

Sovereign AI

AI infrastructure, data handling and governance designed to remain under the required Australian operational and legal controls.

On-premise AI

Models and retrieval systems that run on infrastructure physically controlled by the operator.

Air-gapped

A system with no connection to external networks. Data transfers and updates follow a controlled process within that isolated environment.

Inference

The live step where a model produces an output from an input and the context supplied to it.

Inference topology

The layout of model runtimes, data stores, policy controls, audit logs and approved routes that determines where each AI workload runs.

Retrieval-augmented generation

A pattern where the system retrieves relevant approved material before composing an answer, keeping evidence close to the output.

Fine-tuning

Adapting a model to repeated terminology or task patterns while keeping retrieval, permissions and evaluation as separate controls.

Provenance

The recorded path from an AI output back to its inputs — which documents, which model, which approvals. Shows where an answer came from; a person still decides whether it's right.

Operational knowledge

The records a business runs on — project files, contracts, procedures, correspondence — made searchable by AI without changing who may see what, which revision counts, or how each document is classified.