Glossary
Glossary
Front matter for AI Foundations for Accountants. These definitions match the cards in Module 1.
- Agentic AI
- Breaks a goal into steps, selects which tools to use, and carries out multi step actions with limited supervision. It decides the steps, you review the result.
- Generative AI
- Produces new content in response to a written instruction, rather than retrieving a stored answer. You decide the steps, it writes the content.
- Hallucination
- The industry term for invented output.
- Prompt
- Whatever you hand the model to work from. A question, an instruction, a spreadsheet, a PDF, or all of those in one message.
- Rules-based automation
- Follows conditional instructions a person wrote, producing the same output for the same input every time. You wrote every step.
- SOP
- A written, step-by-step description of how a task gets done at your organization. It captures the steps, the rules, and the checks, so the task comes out the same way no matter who does it or which month it is.
- Workflow
- A path somebody drew in advance. It reaches only the systems it was wired to reach, and it cannot work out that one answer has to come before another.