Definitions for the most important terms in agentic AI — written for both technical and business audiences.
Hand-picked pieces from our architects, customers and partners.
Systems that take goals as input and deliver outcomes.
Read more →Accept a goal, deliver an outcome without step-by-step direction.
Read more →Specialized agents coordinated to complete workflows.
Read more →Retrieval-augmented generation.
Read more →RAG with access policy enforced at retrieval.
Read more →Role-based access control.
Read more →Immutable record of agent actions.
Read more →Plausible but unsupported model output.
Read more →Cloud within a jurisdiction with government-grade controls.
Read more →We publish what we'd want to read if we were building agents in your shoes — short on hype, long on practice.
The agentic AI vocabulary is moving fast. This glossary collects working definitions from practitioners so teams can communicate without re-litigating terms in every meeting.
A one-paragraph plain-English definition. No jargon, no marketing.
When and why the concept matters in enterprise practice.
A brief note on how the concept maps to xyner — without overselling.
Pointers to related vocabulary so you can navigate the conceptual map.
Terms are revised as the field evolves; definitions are dated where it matters.
The principles that distinguish how we approach this — calibrated for senior enterprise audiences.
Definitions reflect how engineering, operations and risk teams actually use the terms — not how vendors would prefer they were used.
Where a term has multiple working definitions in the industry, we say so and give you both — so your team can pick consciously.
Categories and patterns that recur across regulated industries.
Foundational concepts — RAG, vector database, control/data plane, model routing.
RBAC, ABAC, audit trail, approval gate, sovereignty, EU AI Act.
Self-healing, compensating action, observability, OpenTelemetry.
Hallucination, prompt injection, grounding, guardrails.
Agentic AI, autonomous goal execution, multi-agent orchestration, tool calling.
Session memory, long-term memory, organizational memory.
Most vendor glossaries define each term to fit their product. We aim to define each term as practitioners actually use it.
Plays well with
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