Skip to content
Magnetic Keys
AI

Knowledge base

Also known as: vector store · company brain

Definition

The curated store of company material an AI system retrieves from — case studies, pricing rules, product specifications, past answers. Its quality sets the ceiling on everything built on top of it.

Most disappointing internal AI deployments are knowledge-base failures rather than model failures. Point retrieval at a shared drive containing four versions of the price list and the system will confidently cite the wrong one.

The work is curation and ownership: one canonical version of each document, dated, with a named owner who updates it. Unglamorous, and it is roughly where the value comes from.

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
Put it to work

Definitions are free.So is the cost review.

A short call, then a written review inside 72 hours: what your marketing costs, what it produces, and what is worth fixing first.

Browse the glossary
hello@magnetickeys.comWhatsApp +971 52 529 5577Al Khawaneej, Dubai · United Arab Emirates