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AI

Context window

Definition

The maximum amount of text a model can consider at once, counted in tokens. Everything the system needs to reason about — instructions, retrieved documents, conversation history — competes for the same budget.

A larger window is not automatically better. Models attend unevenly across a long context, and material buried in the middle of a very large prompt is reliably used less than material at either end. Retrieving the right five pages beats pasting in five hundred.

For buyers this surfaces as a design question: does the proposed system search your knowledge base and pass the relevant part, or does it stuff everything in and hope? The first scales and stays accurate; the second gets more expensive and less reliable as your content grows.

More in AI

Agentic workflow

A process where an AI system is given a goal rather than a script, and chooses its own sequence of tool calls to reach it. Distinguished from automation by being non-deterministic: the same input can produce a different route each run.

AI agent

An AI agent is a system that pursues a goal across multiple steps using tools — reading data, calling APIs, updating records — rather than producing a single response to a single prompt.

AI automation ROI

The payback calculation for an automation: hours recovered multiplied by fully loaded hourly cost, against build plus running cost. Frequency dominates the result — the same build against a process running twice a month rarely pays back at all.

AI observability

Logging and monitoring for AI systems: what went in, what came out, which tools were called, what it cost, and how often a human overrode it. Without it, a misbehaving automation is undiagnosable.

AI readiness

Whether a business has the process documentation, data quality and decision ownership for AI to add value. Readiness is mostly organisational: the constraint is almost never model capability.

Automation debt

The accumulated cost of automations nobody owns: undocumented flows, forgotten triggers, and scripts that break silently when an upstream field is renamed. The AI-era version of technical debt.

All 87 terms
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