Glossary

AI customer service, defined

Short, honest definitions for the terms that come up when you're evaluating AI support. Each one answers the question first.

AI agent: An AI agent is a system that uses a language model to work towards a goal over multiple steps, typically by deciding which tools or actions to use along the way.
AI customer service: AI customer service is the use of a language model to answer customer questions automatically, usually on a website, in chat, or over email.
Answer engine optimization (AEO): Answer engine optimization is the practice of structuring content so that AI-powered answer engines can understand it, quote it accurately, and attribute it to you.
Embedding: An embedding is a numerical representation of text that captures its meaning, allowing passages with similar meaning to be found even when they share no words.
Knowledge base: A knowledge base is an organised collection of articles and documents that answers recurring questions about a product, service or organisation.
Lead qualification: Lead qualification is the process of deciding which enquiries are a genuine fit for what you sell, so sales time goes to the ones most likely to convert.
RAG (retrieval-augmented generation): Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a technique where relevant source passages are retrieved from a document collection and given to a language model, so its answer is grounded in those passages rather than its training data.
Website chatbot: A website chatbot is a chat interface embedded on a website that answers visitor questions, either from a scripted decision tree or by generating answers from source content.