AI Dictionary for Business Owners

1. 01

   AI (artificial intelligence)

   Software that does work we used to think needed a person, like writing a reply or spotting a pattern in your sales.

   For your business: it's a tool, like a spreadsheet, and it's good for some jobs and wrong for others.

2. 02

   Generative AI

   AI that makes something new, like a paragraph or an image. ChatGPT and Claude are examples.

   For your business: it gives you a first draft. You still decide what goes out.

3. 03

   Large language model (LLM)

   The engine inside chat tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. It writes by predicting the next words, based on the text it learned from.

   For your business: it writes smoothly even when it's wrong.

4. 04

   Prompt

   What you type to ask the AI for something.

   For your business: say who it's for and show an example of what you want. A clearer ask gets a better answer.

5. 05

   Context window

   How much the AI can keep in mind at once, counted in tokens, which are small pieces of words.

   For your business: in a long chat it can lose track of what you said at the start, so start a new chat for a new task.

6. 06

   Hallucination

   When AI states something false as if it were true, like a made-up number or a quote nobody said.

   For your business: check names, numbers and sources before you publish or send anything.

7. 07

   Bias

   AI learns from what people have written, so it can repeat their blind spots and stereotypes.

   For your business: read what it writes as each of your customers would, not only the ones most like you.

8. 08

   Training on your data

   Some AI tools use what you type to improve their models. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini each have a setting for it, and in ChatGPT and Gemini it's on until you turn it off.

   For your business: check that setting before you paste in client details or anything private.

9. 09

   RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)

   The AI looks things up in a set of documents, like your help pages, before it answers.

   For your business: it's how a chatbot can answer from your own information instead of guessing.

10. 10

    AI agent

    AI that does things on its own, like booking an appointment or sending an email.

    For your business: start with tasks you can check, and have a person approve anything a customer will see.

You don't need every new tool. Pick one task you do every week that follows the same steps, and try AI on that.

Here from my talk at Willa? Marqo is the app I showed: it keeps a record of what you decided with each client, and why.