A–Z Reference
Plain language · No jargon
Glossary
Every AI and SaaS term you'll hit in a pricing page or product demo — explained in one plain paragraph, then the nuance.
879
Terms defined
A
73 terms- A/B Testing
- Abstention
- Abstraction Layer
- Acceptance Criteria
- Acceptance Threshold
- Access Review
- ACID
- Action
- Activation
- Active User (DAU, WAU, MAU)
- Adjudication
- Agent
- Agent Budget
- Agent Checkpointing
- Agent Handoff
- Agent Identity
- Agent Loop
- Agent Memory
- Agent Sandbox
- Agent Simulation
- Agent Trajectory
- Agentic AI
- Agentic RAG
- Aggregator
- Aha Moment
- AI Coding Assistant
- AI Copywriting
- AI Crawler
- AI Disclosure
- AI Governance
- AI Incident Reporting
- AI Literacy
- AI Review Board
- AI Risk Tiering
- AI System Inventory
- AI Usage Policy
- AI Watermarking
- Air-Gapped Deployment
- Airtable
- Alignment Tax
- Analogical Prompting
- ANN Search
- Annotation Guidelines
- Annual Contract Value (ACV)
- Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
- API
- API Deprecation
- API Gateway
- API Key
- API Rate Limiting Strategy (Backoff)
- API Versioning
- API-First
- App Review
- Approval Fatigue
- Approval Workflow
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Aspect-Ratio Control
- Attention
- Attribution Model
- Audio Generation
- Audio Super-Resolution
- Audit Log (Audit Trail)
- Auto-Renewal Clause
- Autocapture
- Automatic Prompt Optimization
- Automation Bias
- Automation Platform
- Automation Recipe
- Autonomous Agent
- Autoscaling
- Availability Zone (AZ)
- Avatar Generation
- Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA)
B
29 terms- Backend for Frontend (BFF)
- Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS)
- Backfill
- Background Removal
- Backpressure
- Baseline Model
- Batch Image Generation
- Batch Inference
- Batch Processing
- Beam Search
- Benchmark Contamination
- Blast Radius
- Blind Evaluation
- Block Storage
- Blue-Green Deployment
- BM25
- Brand Voice
- Break-Glass Access
- Bridge Letter
- Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)
- Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)
- Bubble
- Budget Alert
- Build vs. Buy
- Bulk API
- Burn Multiple
- Burn Rate
- Business Associate Agreement (BAA)
- Business Logic
C
87 terms- CAC Payback Period
- Cache
- Canary Deployment
- Canary Prompt
- Canonical URL
- CAP Theorem
- Captioning
- Catastrophic Forgetting
- Ceiling Effect
- CFG Scale (Classifier-Free Guidance)
- Chain of Density (CoD)
- Chain-of-Thought Prompting
- Chain-of-Verification
- Champion-Challenger (A/B Model Testing)
- Change Data Capture (CDC)
- Change Freeze
- Channel-Market Fit
- Chaos Engineering
- Character Consistency
- Chart Generation
- Chroma
- Chunk Overlap
- Chunking
- Churn
- Circuit Breaker
- Citizen Developer
- Class Imbalance
- Cloud Development Environment (CDE)
- Code Completion
- Code Coverage
- Code Generation
- Code Review
- Cohort
- Cold Start
- Colorization
- Columnar Storage
- Command-Line Interface (CLI)
- Committed Spend Discount
- Computer Use
- Computer Vision
- Concurrency Limit
- Conditional Logic
- Confidence Threshold
- Connection Pooling
- Connector
- Connector Versioning
- Constitutional AI
- Constrained Decoding
- Containerization
- Content Brief
- Content Credentials
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Content Management System (CMS)
- Content Optimization
- Content Provenance
- Context Engineering
- Context Stuffing
- Context Window
- Context Window Pricing
- Continuous Batching
- Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
- Contract Testing
- Contraction Revenue
- Control Plane and Data Plane
- ControlNet
- Conventional Commits
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
- Cosine Similarity
- Cost Allocation Tag
- Cost Chargeback
- Cost Observability
- Cost Per Conversation
- Cost per Resolution
- Cost Per Seat
- Cost per Task
- Coverage Gap
- Crawl Budget
- Credit Expiry
- Credit-Based Pricing
- Cross-Validation
- Cursor Pagination
- Custom API Call (HTTP Request Module)
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Customer Data Platform (CDP)
- Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures)
D
59 terms- Data Augmentation
- Data Catalog
- Data Classification
- Data Contract
- Data Deduplication
- Data Enrichment
- Data Export Guarantee
- Data Flow Map
- Data Labeling
- Data Lake
- Data Lakehouse
- Data Lineage
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
- Data Mapping
- Data Mesh
- Data Minimization
- Data Pipeline
- Data Poisoning
- Data Portability
- Data Processing Agreement (DPA)
- Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA)
- Data Residency
- Data Retention Policy
- Data Retention Policy
- Data Sampling
- Data Store
- Data Subject Access Request (DSAR)
- Data Warehouse
- Database App
- Database Migration
- Dead-Letter Queue (DLQ)
- Debugger
- Deep Learning
- Deepfake
- Deferred Revenue
- Deflection Rate
- Delete Propagation
- Delimiter
- Delivery Semantics
- Denoising Strength
- Dependency Injection
- Deprovisioning
- Design Partner
- Developer Experience (DX)
- Differential Privacy
- Diffusion Model
- Digital Human
- Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)
- Directional Stimulus Prompting
- Disaster Recovery
- Distributed Tracing
- Docker
- Domain Capture
- DORA Metrics
- Double Counting
- Drag-and-Drop Builder
- Drift Detection
- Dry Run
- Dunning
E
33 terms- Edge AI
- Edge Function
- Editorial Workflow
- Effective Permissions
- Egress Fees (Data Transfer Out)
- Embedding
- Embedding Cache
- Embedding Drift
- Embedding Index
- Emotion Prompting
- Emotion Synthesis
- Encryption at Rest
- Encryption in Transit
- End-to-End Testing
- Entitlements
- Entity SEO
- Envelope Encryption
- Environment Variable
- Ephemeral Environment
- Error Analysis
- Error Budget
- Error Handler
- Escalation Path
- Escrow (Source Code Escrow)
- ETL
- Eval Harness
- Eval Set Leakage
- Event Ordering
- Eventual Consistency
- Exit Plan
- Expansion Revenue
- Experiment Tracking
- Explainability
F
27 terms- Face Swap
- Failure Mode Taxonomy
- Fair Use Policy
- Fallback Model
- Feature Branch
- Feature Flag
- Feature Store
- Featured Snippet
- Federated Learning
- Feedback Signal
- Few-Shot Prompting
- Field Mapping
- Filter Step
- Fine-Tune vs RAG
- Fine-Tuning
- FinOps (Cloud Financial Operations)
- Flaky Test
- FlashAttention
- Form Builder
- Formula Field
- Foundation Model
- Frame Interpolation
- Free Trial
- Freemium
- Function Calling (Tool Use)
- Function Schema
- Funnel
G
25 terms- GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)
- Generated Knowledge Prompting
- Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
- Git
- GitOps
- Glide
- Golden Dataset
- Good-Better-Best Pricing
- Goodhart's Law
- GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)
- GPU Utilization
- Grandfathering
- Graph Database
- GraphQL
- GraphRAG
- Gross Margin
- Gross Revenue Retention (GRR)
- Ground Truth
- Grounded Generation
- Grounding
- Growth Loop
- gRPC
- Guardrail Metric
- Guardrails
H
16 terms- Hallucination
- Handwriting Synthesis
- Headless Architecture
- Headless CMS
- Headshot Generation
- HIPAA
- HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World)
- Hot Reload
- hreflang
- Human Baseline
- Human-in-the-Loop
- Human-on-the-Loop
- Hybrid Pricing
- Hybrid Search
- Hyperparameter Tuning
- Hypothetical Document Embeddings (HyDE)
I
40 terms- Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
- Idempotency
- Idempotency Key
- Identity Resolution
- Image Generation
- Image Variations
- Image-to-3D
- Image-to-Image
- Image-to-Video
- Immutable Infrastructure
- Implementation Fee
- In-Context Learning
- Incident Management
- Incrementality
- Index (Database)
- Industry Benchmark
- Inference
- Inference Cost
- Inference Latency
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Infrastructure Drift
- Inpainting
- Instant Trigger
- Instruction Hierarchy
- Instruction Tuning
- Instruction-Based Image Editing
- Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
- Integration
- Integration Attach Rate
- Integration Marketplace
- Inter-Annotator Agreement
- Internal Developer Platform (IDP)
- Internal Linking
- Internal Tool
- Intervention Rate
- IP Allowlist
- IP Indemnification
- iPaaS
- ISO/IEC 27001
- Iterator
J
6 termsK
6 termsL
31 terms- Label Noise
- Land and Expand
- Landing Zone
- Large Language Model (LLM)
- Late-Arriving Data
- Latency
- Latent Space
- Lead Scoring
- Leading and Lagging Indicators
- Least-to-Most Prompting
- Lifecycle Email
- Limitation of Liability
- Linked Records (Relations)
- Linter
- Lip Sync
- LLM Benchmark
- LLM-as-Judge
- LLMOps
- llms.txt
- Load Balancer
- Load Testing
- Lockfile
- Logo Churn
- Logo Generation
- Logprobs (Log Probabilities)
- Long-Horizon Task
- Lookup Field
- Lost in the Middle
- Low-Code
- Low-Code Platform
- Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)
M
50 terms- Machine Learning (ML)
- Maintenance Window
- Make (Integromat)
- Managed Kubernetes
- Managed Service
- Margin Erosion
- Marketing-Qualified Lead (MQL)
- Master Service Agreement (MSA)
- Materialized View
- Max Tokens
- MCP Server
- Membership Inference Attack
- Merchant of Record (MoR)
- Message Queue
- Meta Prompt
- Metadata Filtering
- Metric Restatement
- Metric Tree
- Minimum Commitment
- Mixture of Experts (MoE)
- Mocking (Test Doubles)
- Model Calibration
- Model Card
- Model Cascade
- Model Collapse
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- Model Deprecation
- Model Exfiltration (Model Extraction)
- Model Registry
- Model Router
- Model Serving
- Model Versioning
- Model Weights
- Monorepo
- Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
- Motion Capture Synthesis
- Multi-Agent System
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
- Multi-Region
- Multi-Step Zap
- Multi-Tenancy
- Multi-Tenant
- Multi-Touch Attribution
- Multi-Turn Prompting
- Multi-Vendor Strategy
- Multimodal
- Multimodal Generation
- Music Generation
- Mutual TLS (mTLS)
N
19 termsO
25 terms- OAuth
- OAuth Connection
- OAuth Scopes
- Object Storage
- Observability
- Offline Evaluation
- OLAP (Online Analytical Processing)
- OLTP (Online Transaction Processing)
- On-Call Rotation
- On-Premises
- Onboarding
- Open Core
- OpenAPI Specification
- OpenTelemetry (OTel)
- Operations & Tasks (Automation Billing Units)
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
- Orchestrator-Worker Pattern
- Order Form
- ORM (Object-Relational Mapping)
- Outcome-Based Pricing
- Outpainting
- Output Formatting
- Output Validation
- Overage
- Overfitting
P
70 terms- Package Manager
- Pairwise Evaluation
- Parameter
- Paraphrasing
- Partner API
- Passkey
- Penetration Testing (Pen Test)
- Percentile
- Permission-Aware Retrieval
- Perplexity (Metric)
- Persona Consistency
- Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
- pgvector
- Photo Restoration
- PII Redaction
- Pilot Agreement
- Pinecone
- Plagiarism Checker
- Plan-and-Solve Prompting
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Policy Exception
- Polling
- Position Bias
- Positional Encoding
- Positive Prompting
- PostgreSQL
- Postmortem
- Precision and Recall
- Pretraining
- Price Increase Cap
- Principle of Least Privilege
- Privacy Rules (Row-Level Security)
- Private App
- Private Endpoint
- Process Mapping
- Procurement Cycle
- Product Analytics
- Product Photography Generation
- Product-Led Growth (PLG)
- Product-Qualified Lead (PQL)
- Production Readiness Review
- Program-Aided Language Model (PAL)
- Programmatic SEO
- Prompt
- Prompt Caching
- Prompt Chaining
- Prompt Compression
- Prompt Drift
- Prompt Engineering
- Prompt Ensembling
- Prompt Injection
- Prompt Injection Defense
- Prompt Injection Testing
- Prompt Leaking
- Prompt Library
- Prompt Logging
- Prompt Template
- Prompt Testing
- Prompt Versioning
- Prompt-to-Code
- Prompt-to-Image
- Proof of Concept (POC)
- Proof of Value (PoV)
- Property-Based Testing
- Proration
- Provisioned Throughput
- Proxy Metric
- Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub)
- Pull Request (PR)
- Purpose Limitation
Q
2 termsR
55 terms- RAG Chunking
- Ramp Deal
- Rate Limit
- Rate Limit Backoff
- Rate Limiting
- ReAct Prompting
- Real User Monitoring (RUM)
- Reasoning Model
- Reconciliation
- Red-Teaming
- Redis
- Reference Customer
- Referral Program
- Reflection Pattern
- Reflexion
- Refresh Token
- Region Pinning
- Regression Testing
- Reinforcement Learning (RL)
- Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)
- Relighting
- Renewal Uplift
- Repetition Penalty
- Rephrase and Respond (RaR)
- Replication
- Reproducibility
- Request Deduplication
- Request for Proposal (RFP)
- Reranking
- Reserved Instances
- Restore Test
- Retention Curve
- Retool
- Retrieval
- Retrieval Evaluation
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Reusable Component
- Reverse ETL
- Reverse Trial
- Reversible Action
- Reward Hacking
- Right to Audit
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
- robots.txt
- Role Prompting
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
- Rollback
- Rollup Field
- Router
- Rubric Prompting
- Rule of 40
- Run History
- Run-to-Run Variance
- Runbook
S
112 terms- S3
- SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)
- SaaS Magic Number
- SaaS Quick Ratio
- Saga Pattern
- SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language)
- Sample Ratio Mismatch (SRM)
- Sandbox Environment
- Scaling Laws
- Scenario
- Scheduled Trigger
- Schema Drift
- Schema Markup
- Schema Prompting
- Schema Registry
- SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management)
- Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
- Search Intent
- Seasonality
- Seat Sprawl
- Seat Utilization
- Seat-Based Pricing
- Secret Scanning
- Secrets Management
- Security Questionnaire
- Seed Control
- Self-Ask Prompting
- Self-Consistency
- Self-Hosted Automation
- Self-Refine
- Self-Reported Attribution
- Self-Serve
- Self-Supervised Learning
- Semantic Cache
- Semantic Caching
- Semantic Layer
- Semantic Search
- Semantic Versioning (SemVer)
- Server-Sent Events (SSE)
- Serverless
- Service Account
- Service Credit
- Service Level Objective (SLO)
- Service Mesh
- Service-Level Agreement (SLA)
- Session Replay
- Shadow AI
- Shadow Deployment
- Shadow IT
- Sharding
- Shared Responsibility Model
- Shelfware
- Shift Left
- Showback
- Silent Failure
- Simpson's Paradox
- Singing Voice Synthesis
- Single Point of Failure
- Single Sign-On (SSO)
- Single Source of Truth (SSOT)
- Single-Tenant Deployment
- Skeleton-of-Thought
- Slide Generation
- Sliding Window Attention
- Slowly Changing Dimension
- Small Language Model (SLM)
- Snapshot Testing
- SOC 2
- Softr
- Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)
- Software Development Kit (SDK)
- Software Supply-Chain Security
- Sound Effect Generation
- Speculative Decoding
- Speech-to-Speech
- Speech-to-Text (STT)
- Spend Cap
- Spot Check
- Spot Instances
- SSO Tax
- Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs)
- Star Schema
- Statement of Work (SOW)
- Static Analysis
- Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
- Static Site Generator (SSG)
- Statistical Significance
- Status Page
- Step-Back Prompting
- Stop Sequence
- Storyboard Generation
- Stratified Sampling
- Streaming Data Processing
- Streaming Generation
- Structured Output
- Style Transfer
- Sub-processor
- Sub-Workflow (Nested Automation)
- Subprocessor
- Subtitle Generation
- Summarization
- Supervised Learning
- Survivorship Bias
- SVG Generation
- Switching Cost
- Sycophancy
- Sync Conflict Resolution
- Sync Loop
- Synthetic Data
- Synthetic Media
- Synthetic Monitoring
- System Prompt
T
56 terms- Table Partitioning
- Task Success Rate
- Technical Debt
- Temperature
- Template (No-code)
- Tenant Isolation
- Terminal / Shell
- Termination for Convenience
- Test-Time Compute
- Text Generation
- Text-to-3D
- Text-to-Diagram
- Text-to-Speech (TTS)
- Text-to-Speech Cloning (Voice Cloning)
- Text-to-SQL
- Text-to-Video
- Texture Generation
- Throughput
- Time to First Token (TTFT)
- Time-Series Database (TSDB)
- Time-to-Value (TTV)
- Token
- Token Budget
- Token Efficiency
- Token Revocation
- Tokenizer
- Tolerant Reader
- Tool Calling
- Tool Description
- Tool Error Recovery
- Tool Registry
- Top-k Sampling
- Top-p (Nucleus Sampling)
- Topical Authority
- Total Contract Value (TCV)
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
- TPU (Tensor Processing Unit)
- Tracking Plan
- Train/Test Split
- Training Data Opt-Out
- Training-Serving Skew
- Transactional Outbox
- Transcription
- Transfer Learning
- Transformer
- Transition Assistance
- Translation
- Tree-of-Thought
- Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate
- Trigger
- True-Up
- Trunk-Based Development
- Trust Center
- TTL (Time to Live)
- Two-Way Sync
- Type Safety
U
11 termsV
27 terms- Value Metric
- Vector Database
- Vector Index
- Vector Quantization
- Vector Store
- Vendor Consolidation
- Vendor Lock-In
- Vendor Risk Assessment
- Vendor Scorecard
- Version Control
- Vertical SaaS
- Vibe Coding
- Video Dubbing
- Video Synthesis
- Video-to-Video
- Viral Coefficient (K-Factor)
- Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
- Virtual Try-On
- Visual Programming
- Vocal Isolation
- Voice Activity Detection
- Voice Cloning
- Voice Design
- Voice Isolation (Noise Suppression)
- Voice Synthesis
- VRAM
- Vulnerability Disclosure Policy