The vocabulary, without the mystique.

Agent canvas

An agent canvas is a visual workspace that shows every AI agent on a team as its own element: what it is working on right now, what it is reasoning through, and how work flows from one agent to the next.

AI agent

An AI agent is software that pursues a goal by deciding on and carrying out multi-step actions — searching, judging, drafting — rather than only answering the prompt in front of it.

AI agent team

An AI agent team is a group of specialized AI agents that share one pipeline, with each agent owning a single, sharp responsibility — one finds, one qualifies, one drafts, one hands off for approval.

AI credits

AI credits are a usage-based billing unit that meters the work AI agents actually perform: each discrete action — finding leads, qualifying them, drafting a message — deducts a small, fixed number of credits.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — cite it in the answers they generate.

Approval-first

Approval-first is a design principle for AI agents in which every outward-facing or irreversible action — sending an email, publishing a post, spending money — requires explicit human approval before it executes.

Autonomy ladder

An autonomy ladder is a graduated trust model for AI agents: they begin by proposing every action for human approval, earn permission to handle routine work independently within explicit limits, and only gradually gain broader autonomy.

Cold outreach

Cold outreach is a first-contact message — usually email — sent to someone who has no prior relationship with you, to open a conversation about your product or service.

Do-not-contact list

A do-not-contact list is a suppression list of addresses that must never receive a message, no matter what a campaign or agent tries to send.

Dunning

Dunning is the systematic process of reminding customers to pay overdue invoices, using a sequence of messages that escalate in firmness as the invoice ages.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your content easy for generative AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the AI answers embedded in search — to retrieve, understand, and cite.

Human-in-the-loop (HITL)

Human-in-the-loop (HITL) is a design pattern where an automated system pauses at defined checkpoints so a person can review, edit, or reject its output before the process continues.

Lead qualification

Lead qualification is the decision, made before any outreach, about whether a prospect is worth pursuing at all.

Lead scoring

Lead scoring is the practice of ranking prospects with a numeric value that reflects how well they fit your offer and how likely they are to respond.

llms.txt

llms.txt is an emerging web convention: a plain-Markdown file served at /llms.txt that gives AI crawlers a curated entry point to a site.

Orchestrator

An orchestrator is the coordinating layer of an AI agent team: it assembles the right specialists for a goal, routes work between them, and gates each stage so output only moves forward when it's ready.

Send window

A send window is a configured time range — usually business hours — during which outbound messages like cold emails are allowed to go out.

Structured data

Structured data is machine-readable markup — most commonly schema.org vocabulary written as JSON-LD — added to a web page so search engines and AI answer engines can understand exactly what the page contains.