--- title: "AI Glossary: AI terms explained | Carl-Uwe Würfel" description: "The AI glossary for decision-makers: AI terms explained in depth, with definition, how it works, FAQs, a practical example and where each term stops." url: https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary author: Carl-Uwe Würfel --- 1. [Home](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en) 2. [Knowledge](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/knowledge) 3. Glossary # AI Glossary The terms that come up when a company talks about AI, in five groups: foundations, models and technology, working with AI, leadership and law, search and visibility. Each term with a definition, how it works, common questions, an example and the point where it stops carrying weight. ## By first letter ABCDEFGHIJ · KLMNOPQRSTUVW · X · Y · Z 54 terms No term matches. Reset the filter or try another spelling. ## A 1. [Working with AI**AI agents** An AI agent is a system in which a language model pursues a goal in steps, decides on its own which tools to call, and checks the results until the task is done.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/ki-agenten) 2. [Working with AI**AI assistant** An AI assistant is software built on a language model that completes a task when a person asks, such as writing a draft, and hands the result back for review.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/ki-assistent) 3. [Leadership & law**AI bias** AI bias refers to systematic distortions in an AI system’s results that repeatedly favor or disadvantage certain groups or characteristics.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/ki-bias) 4. [Working with AI**AI guardrails** AI guardrails are technical controls outside the model: checks and limits that define what an AI application may accept, output and execute.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/guardrails) 5. [Leadership & law**AI labeling and disclosure** AI labeling and disclosure means indicating that content was wholly or partly generated or altered by AI, either visibly for people or in machine-readable form.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/ki-kennzeichnung) 6. [Working with AI**AI orchestration** AI orchestration is the control layer that connects several AI models, tools, data sources and review steps into one traceable workflow and decides which step may do what.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/ki-orchestrierung) 7. [Search & visibility**AI Overviews** AI Overviews are summaries created with generative AI that Google shows above its search results, with links to the web pages they draw on.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/ai-overviews) 8. [Leadership & law**AI ROI** AI ROI weighs the benefit of an AI initiative against its full cost, calculated over a stated period and with disclosed assumptions.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/roi-ki) 9. [Leadership & law**AI Transformation** AI transformation is the shift of an entire company to AI: workflows, skills and responsibilities change because AI becomes a fixed part of daily work.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/ki-transformation) 10. [Leadership & law**AI Use Case** An AI use case describes a specific, recurring task that AI is meant to support, with the starting situation, data needed, desired result, the person who reviews it and quality criteria.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/use-case) 11. [Leadership & law**AI washing** AI washing means claims that credit a product, service or company with more artificial intelligence than it actually uses or can be shown to deliver.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/ai-washing) 12. [Foundations**Artificial intelligence (AI)** Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to computer systems that infer from data or encoded knowledge how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations or decisions.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/kuenstliche-intelligenz) ## B 1. [Leadership & law**Build vs. Buy** Build vs. buy is the decision whether a company develops an AI system itself, buys a finished product or combines the two, and with it, who runs and maintains the system.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/build-vs-buy) ## C 1. [Models & technology**Chain of thought (CoT)** Chain of thought (CoT) is a prompting technique in which a language model writes out the intermediate steps of a task before it answers. It often improves multi-step tasks.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/chain-of-thought) 2. [Foundations**Chatbot** A chatbot is a program that takes input in natural language, typed or spoken, and responds in a dialogue, either by following fixed rules or by using a language model.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/chatbot) 3. [Working with AI**Context engineering** Context engineering is the deliberate design of everything a language model sees in a call: instructions, retrieved knowledge, conversation history, tools and intermediate results.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/context-engineering) 4. [Models & technology**Context Window** The context window is the maximum number of tokens a language model can take into account in a single call, including instructions, history, documents and, depending on the model, the answer.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/context-window) ## D 1. [Leadership & law**Data governance** Data governance is the framework of roles, rules and decision paths that sets who in a company decides about which data, how it is maintained and who may use it.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/data-governance) 2. [Leadership & law**Data quality** Data quality describes how well data fits its specific purpose, measured by dimensions such as accuracy, completeness, consistency, uniqueness, validity and timeliness.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/datenqualitaet) 3. [Models & technology**Deep learning** Deep learning is a branch of machine learning in which neural networks with many layers learn the relevant features on their own from raw data such as images, speech or text.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/deep-learning) 4. [Leadership & law**Deepfake** A deepfake is AI-generated or manipulated image, audio or video content that resembles real people, places or events and would falsely appear authentic.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/deepfake) ## E 1. [Search & visibility**E-E-A-T** E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: four qualities Google's quality raters use to assess how reliable a piece of content and its source are.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/eeat) 2. [Models & technology**Embeddings** Embeddings are numeric vectors that a model computes from text or other content so that similarity in meaning can be measured by calculation.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/embeddings) 3. [Working with AI**Evals (LLM evaluation)** Evals are repeatable tests that use fixed test cases and scoring criteria to measure whether an AI system handles a specific task well enough, including after every change.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/evals) 4. [Leadership & law**Explainable AI** Explainable AI (XAI) covers methods that show why an AI model reached a result, either by using a model that is readable on its own or by explaining a complex model after the fact.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/explainable-ai) ## F 1. [Models & technology**Fine-Tuning** Fine-tuning is the additional training of a pretrained AI model on your own reviewed examples so that it handles a specific task with a set format, style or behavior.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/fine-tuning) 2. [Models & technology**Foundation model** A foundation model is an AI model pretrained on very broad data that can be adapted to many different tasks; large language models are the best-known example.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/foundation-model) ## G 1. [Leadership & law**General-purpose AI (GPAI)** GPAI (general-purpose AI) is the EU AI Act’s legal term for general-purpose AI models: broadly usable models whose providers carry their own set of obligations.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/gpai) 2. [Foundations**Generative AI** Generative AI is artificial intelligence that uses learned patterns to create new content such as text, images, audio, video or code, rather than only classifying existing data.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/generative-ki) 3. [Search & visibility**Google AI Mode** AI Mode is a dedicated part of Google Search where a Gemini model answers complex questions conversationally and backs the answer with links to web pages.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/ai-mode) 4. [Models & technology**Grounding (AI)** Grounding ties a language model’s answer to verifiable sources available at the time of the request, such as documents, search results or databases, instead of training data alone.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/grounding) ## H 1. [Models & technology**Hallucination** A hallucination is AI output that sounds plausible but is factually wrong or departs from the source it was given, such as an invented study or a wrong detail.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/hallucination) ## I 1. [Search & visibility**Information Gain** In content marketing, information gain is the additional insight a piece of content offers compared with the answers already available for the same question.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/information-gain) ## L 1. [Models & technology**LLM gateway** An LLM gateway is a central layer between applications and AI model providers that every model call passes through, with one point of access, permissions, cost tracking, logging and swappable models.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/llm-gateway) 2. [Models & technology**LLM: Large Language Model** An LLM (large language model) is an AI model that processes and generates text based on learned language patterns, for example to summarize, draft or sort information.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/llm) 3. [Models & technology**LLMOps and MLOps** LLMOps is the disciplined operation of applications built on large language models: versioned prompts and models, testing, monitoring, cost control, logging, and fallback paths.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/llmops) 4. [Search & visibility**llms.txt** llms.txt is an open proposal for a Markdown file that offers AI agents and language models a website's most important content as selected links with short explanations.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/llms-txt) ## M 1. [Foundations**Machine learning** Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence in which software learns its rules from example data instead of having them programmed step by step.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/machine-learning) 2. [Working with AI**MCP: Model Context Protocol** The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard through which AI applications, acting as clients, use tools and data sources that a server provides through one shared interface.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/mcp) ## N 1. [Models & technology**Neural network** A neural network is a computational model made of many connected artificial neurons that learns its task from examples by adjusting the weights between neurons during training.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/neuronales-netz) ## O 1. [Models & technology**Open-source and open-weight models** An open-source LLM is a language model whose weights, code and training data information are released under a free license; if only the weights are free, it is an open-weight model.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/open-source-llm) ## P 1. [Leadership & law**Pilot Graveyard** Pilot graveyard describes AI pilots that, after the trial, are neither moved into supported routine operation nor deliberately shut down, and simply sit unused.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/pilot-graveyard) 2. [Working with AI**Prompt Engineering** Prompt engineering is the systematic design and testing of instructions given to an AI model so that the same instruction produces usable results across many different inputs.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/prompt-engineering) 3. [Working with AI**Prompt injection** Prompt injection is an attack in which text reaches a language model’s input and the model follows it as an instruction, even though it was only meant as content.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/prompt-injection) ## Q 1. [Search & visibility**Query fan-out** Query fan-out is an AI search technique: the model breaks a question into subtopics, runs several related searches at the same time and combines the results into one answer.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/query-fan-out) ## R 1. [Working with AI**RAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation** RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) is a method in which a system searches a knowledge base for relevant content before a language model answers and passes that content to the model as context.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/rag) 2. [Working with AI**RPA: Robotic Process Automation** RPA (robotic process automation) is software that performs repetitive, rule-based steps in the user interface of existing applications the way a person would by hand.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/rpa) ## S 1. [Models & technology**Semantic search** Semantic search finds content by meaning rather than matching words, usually by comparing the query and the texts as numeric vectors (embeddings).](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/semantische-suche) 2. [Leadership & law**Shadow AI** Shadow AI refers to AI tools that employees use for work without the company having provided, reviewed or approved them.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/schatten-ki) 3. [Models & technology**Small language model (SLM)** A small language model (SLM) is a language model with relatively few parameters that runs on a single server or device and suits narrowly defined text tasks.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/small-language-model) 4. [Working with AI**System Prompt** A system prompt is the top-level instruction that the operator of an AI application places before every request to a language model, setting its role, rules and answer format.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/system-prompt) ## T 1. [Models & technology**Token** A token is the unit a language model splits text into, such as a word, part of a word or a punctuation mark; providers measure both cost and capacity in tokens.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/token) 2. [Search & visibility**Topical authority** Topical authority is an SEO term for the assumption that a site covering a subject area thoroughly and with expertise has an advantage in searches on that subject.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/topical-authority) ## V 1. [Models & technology**Vector Database** A vector database stores numeric vectors (embeddings) along with references to the source data and quickly finds the entries most similar to a query.](https://carl-wuerfel.de/en/glossary/vector-database)