- Applied AI
- Using AI tools to do specific, checkable jobs inside a real workflow — as opposed to experimenting with chatbots in the abstract.
- Approval gate
- A designed step where a named human must review and approve before the system acts.
- Auditability
- The property of a system that lets you reconstruct what happened: inputs, decisions, approvals, actions, and outputs.
- Baseline
- A measurement taken before a system exists, used later to judge whether the system actually helped.
- Boundary
- A written rule about what a system must never do — say, decide, send, spend, or store.
- Cost per action
- What one completed automated action costs in tooling, usage fees, and human review time.
- Decision point
- A moment in a workflow where a choice changes what happens next.
- Evidence
- Records kept at each stage — statements, maps, logs, approvals, metrics — that let others understand and trust the system.
- Fallback
- The plan for what happens when an AI step fails, times out, or produces unusable output.
- Human-in-the-loop
- A system design where humans review, approve, or decide at defined points rather than ceding the whole workflow to automation.
- Input
- Anything a system receives to work with: messages, forms, calls, documents, records.
- Knowledge base
- The owned, maintained reference material a system draws on — prices, policies, schedules, answers.
- Never-list
- The written list of things a system must never do, paired with the safeguards that enforce it.
- Operator
- The person who runs a system day to day: reviewing, approving, correcting, and maintaining it.
- Output
- What a system produces for people: replies, summaries, bookings, reports.
- Prototype
- A cheap, fast version of a workflow — often on paper — used to test the design before building.
- Safeguard
- A mechanism that enforces a boundary: spending caps, blocked topics, escalation triggers, kill switches.
- System canvas
- A one-page planning sheet covering problem, people, workflow, AI jobs, approvals, boundaries, and measurement.
- Trigger
- The event that starts a workflow: a missed call, a submitted form, a date arriving.
- Workflow
- The ordered steps from trigger to outcome, including who or what does each step.