Glossary

AI terms for business, in plain English

The words you will hear when your company starts using AI, defined in a sentence or two each.

AI agent
AI software given a goal and access to tools (email, CRM, files, calendar) that decides which steps to take to reach it. In a governed system, every agent has a role, an owner, permissions and limits. AI agents for business
Agent management platform
Software for running AI agents as a team: assigning roles and permissions, routing risky actions for approval, recording what each agent did, and stopping an agent when needed. What an agent management platform does
AI business intelligence
Asking questions of your business data in plain English and getting answers, charts and live dashboards back, with the source of every number, instead of building reports by hand.
AI governance
The rules and controls for how a company uses AI: what data AI may see, what it may do on its own, what needs a person to approve, and how every action is recorded and reviewed.
AI operating system (AI OS)
One private system where a company’s knowledge, AI assistants and AI agents live together, with shared permissions, approvals and an audit trail, instead of a pile of separate AI apps. AI operating system for small business
Answer engine optimization (AEO)
Making a business easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini to find, understand and recommend in their answers. What is AEO?
Audit trail
A record of every action an AI system takes: what it read, what it changed, what it sent and who approved it, so a person can check the work later.
Company Brain
A company’s documents, SOPs, email, meeting notes and records, organized privately so AI can answer questions from them with sources, while respecting who is allowed to see what. Company Brain
Governed intelligence
AI capability a business can trust because it runs under the company’s rules: private data, clear permissions for every agent, approvals for anything risky, a record of every action, and accountable people running it. It is the promise of a Managed AI Provider.
Human-in-the-loop approval
A rule that makes an AI agent stop and wait for a person before anything risky, such as sending a customer email, changing a record or spending money.
Managed AI Provider (MAP)
A company that sets up, runs, governs and updates a private AI system for a business every month: the MSP model applied to AI. What is a Managed AI Provider?
Managed Intelligence Provider (MIP)
A term introduced by Pax8 in 2025 for MSPs that add AI and agent services for their clients. MAP vs MSP vs MIP
Managed Service Provider (MSP)
A company that runs a business’s IT (devices, network, email, security and backups) for a monthly fee. MAP vs MSP vs MIP
Private AI
AI that runs on a company’s own dedicated server or cloud account, so its data is not pooled with other companies or used to train public models. Private AI for business
Shadow AI
Employees using AI tools the company has not approved, often by pasting company or client information into personal chat apps, where nobody can see, govern or retrieve it.
Superintelligence
AI that outperforms people at most kinds of thinking work, not just one task. Several major labs say they are building it; nobody knows when it arrives. What superintelligence means for business

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