Glossary
The words, without the sales pitch
Every term here is one a business owner actually runs into, defined the way we would explain it across a table. Where something is oversold, it says so. Where the honest answer is that you probably do not need it, it says that too.
The building blocks
- AI Agent A system that can take steps on its own toward a goal, rather than answering one question at a time. Where that helps and where it does not.
- AI Chatbot A system that answers customers in a conversation. What separates the ones that last from the ones quietly switched off.
- API The agreed way one piece of software talks to another, and the thing that decides whether two systems you own can be connected at all.
- Document Parsing Pulling the fields you actually need out of a document, so nobody has to retype an invoice, an RFQ or a statement.
- ETL Extract, transform, load: moving data out of one system, reshaping it, and putting it into another so the two can agree.
- Knowledge Base The written answers a system draws on when it responds, kept in one place and maintained deliberately.
- LLM A large language model: the thing underneath the AI tools you use. What it is good at, and the one thing it cannot do on its own.
- No-Code Automation Building workflows by connecting tools in a visual editor. Where it is genuinely the right answer, and where it stops being one.
- OCR Turning a picture of text into text a system can read. The step that decides whether scanned paperwork can be automated at all.
- Prompt Engineering Writing the instructions a model works from. Useful, and much less important than the material you give it.
- Retrieval Finding the relevant passages from your own material and putting them in front of the model before it answers.
- RPA Robotic process automation: software that drives other software the way a person would, clicking through screens when no API exists.
- Voice Agent A system that answers the phone and holds a real conversation. Higher stakes than chat, and less room for a wrong answer.
- Web Scraping Reading information from public web pages automatically. Legitimate uses, and the limits worth respecting.
- Webhook A message one system sends the moment something happens, so nothing has to sit there asking whether it happened yet.
Getting and answering enquiries
- Escalation Rule The written condition under which a system stops handling something itself and gets a person, and which person.
- Handoff The moment work passes from a system to a person, or between two people, along with the context needed to continue.
- Human In The Loop A design where a person reviews, approves or takes over at a defined point, rather than the system acting end to end.
- Intake Form The structured questions a new enquiry answers before a person gets involved, designed to collect exactly what the next step needs.
- Lead Qualification Working out which enquiries are worth your time, and in what order, before anybody spends an hour on one.
- Lead Response Time How long a new enquiry waits for a first reply. The same measure as speed to lead, usually reported more generously.
- Missed Call Text Back An automatic text sent the moment a call goes unanswered, so the enquiry continues instead of ending in a ring-out.
- No-Show Rate The share of booked appointments where the customer does not arrive and did not cancel in time to fill the slot.
- Speed To Lead The time between an enquiry arriving and a real first response. The single most predictive number in most small businesses.
- Speed To Lead SLA A written commitment to how fast a new enquiry gets a first response, per channel and per hour of the day, with an owner attached.
Turning enquiries into customers
- Abandoned Cart Flow The sequence of messages sent to someone who added items to a cart and left without buying.
- Conversion Rate The share of people who take the step you wanted. Useful only when you are specific about which step and which people.
- Funnel The stages someone passes through on the way to becoming a customer, and the places they drop out.
- Landing Page A page built for one audience arriving from one place, with one thing to do on it.
- Retargeting Advertising to people who already visited you. Effective, easy to overdo, and increasingly constrained by privacy rules.
- Review Velocity How many reviews a business collects over time, and how steadily, as distinct from how many it has in total.
- Sales Funnel The same idea as a funnel, viewed from the sales side: what happens to an enquiry once it is in front of a person.
Running the business
- AI Automation Using AI to do work that used to need a person, inside a process that still has to be defined by one. What it does and does not cover.
- Backend Dashboard One screen that shows what is actually happening across systems that do not talk to each other.
- Business Intelligence Turning the data you already generate into answers you can act on. Mostly a plumbing problem rather than an analysis one.
- CRM The system that holds your customers and what has happened with each of them. What it is for, and what it will not do on its own.
- CRM Integration Connecting your CRM to everything else so the same information is not typed into it by hand.
- Data Enrichment Filling in what you do not know about a contact from other sources. Useful, and a privacy decision before it is a technical one.
- Dispatch Automation Assigning jobs to the right person or vehicle, and pushing the details and changes to them, without a coordinator working a phone all day.
- Integration Debt The accumulated cost of connections built quickly, undocumented, or dependent on one person knowing how they work.
- Inventory Sync Keeping stock numbers the same everywhere you sell, so you stop selling things you do not have.
- Marketing Automation Sending the right message at the right moment without somebody scheduling each one. Where it earns its keep and where it annoys people.
- System Of Record The one system treated as authoritative for a given kind of information when two systems disagree.
- Workflow Automation Making a defined sequence of steps run without somebody driving it. The oldest and still the most valuable kind.
Search and advertising
- Google Ads Automation Automating the management of search advertising. What is worth handing over and what still needs a person.
- Local SEO Getting found by people searching nearby. Driven far more by your business profile and reviews than by your website.
- Meta Ads Automation Automating the management of Facebook and Instagram advertising, including the parts that break quietly.
- Programmatic SEO Generating many pages from structured data. Powerful when each page is genuinely useful, and penalised when they are not.
- Schema Markup Structured data that tells search engines what a page is about in a form they can read without guessing.
- SEO Automation Automating the mechanical parts of search work. Which parts those are, and which parts should stay human.
Compliance, privacy and safety
- Audit Trail A durable record of what happened, when, and who or what caused it, produced as the work happens rather than reconstructed afterwards.
- Data Residency Where your data physically lives. A design decision that has to be made before anything is connected, not discovered afterwards.
- Data Retention How long information is kept before it is deleted, decided deliberately per type of data rather than by default.
- ÉFVP A privacy impact assessment under Quebec law: the analysis required before certain uses of personal information, including sending it outside Quebec.
- Loi 25 Quebec's private-sector privacy law, known as Loi 25. It applies to every business regardless of size, and it governs most of what you would want to automate.
- Loi 96 Quebec's language law as amended by Bill 96, and what it requires of business software and customer communications.
- Rate Limiting A cap on how many requests one user or source can make in a period, to keep a shared service available and affordable.
- Sandbox Environment A separate copy of a system, with test data, where changes can be tried without touching anything real.