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The language of collaborative AI.

Plain definitions for the agents, workflows, controls and connected systems your team uses in Ceven.

Every term, written for people.

ACAThe federal law requiring applicable large employers to offer affordable health coverage to full-time employees and report annually on coverage offered.HR & Compliance Access reviewA periodic audit confirming that every user retains only the access their current role requires, with documented attestations from the appropriate manager.Compliance Account-based marketing (ABM)A go-to-market strategy that targets a defined set of high-value accounts with coordinated, personalized marketing and sales effort rather than broad lead generation.Sales & GTM Accounts payable (AP)The function responsible for managing and paying a business's obligations to its vendors, covering invoice receipt, validation, approval, and payment.Finance & Procurement Accounts receivable (AR)The money owed to a business by its customers for delivered goods or services, and the function responsible for invoicing and collecting it.Finance & Procurement Action (workflow step)A step in a workflow that performs an operation, such as sending a message, updating a record, or calling an API, as distinct from the trigger that starts the run.Workflow Agent evaluationThe practice of measuring whether an AI agent reliably completes its tasks correctly, safely, and efficiently across realistic multi-step scenarios.Agents Agent handoffThe transfer of a task from one agent to another agent or to a human, typically triggered by low confidence, a required approval, or a need for specialized handling.Agents Agent memoryThe mechanisms by which an AI agent retains information across steps or sessions, ranging from short-term working context to durable stored knowledge.Agents Agent orchestrationThe coordination layer that sequences an agent's steps, manages tool calls, handles errors and retries, enforces approvals, and records what happened.Agents Agentic AIAI that pursues a goal by planning, taking actions across tools, and adapting over multiple steps, rather than responding to a single prompt in isolation.Agents Agentic workflowA defined business process in which one or more steps are handled by an AI agent making decisions or taking actions, interleaved with deterministic automation.Agents AI agentA software system that uses an LLM to execute a workflow against the customer's connected systems, reading from sources, taking actions, and writing results back through the standard authorization model.Concepts AI agent workforceA coordinated set of specialized AI agents that work alongside a human team to run operational workflows across every department of a business.Concepts AI copilotAn AI assistant embedded in a person's workflow that suggests, drafts, and answers while the human remains in control of the final action.Agents AI operatorAn AI system that runs an operational process end to end, taking the actions across systems that a human operator would otherwise perform.Agents AI orchestratorThe component of an AI agent platform that coordinates the chain of actions across systems, handles error recovery, manages approval gates, and writes the audit log.Concepts AI workflow automationThe use of language models to execute multi-step business processes across connected tools, combining deterministic actions with steps that require judgment or language understanding.AI & Automation APIA defined interface through which one software system exposes its data and functions for another system to use programmatically.Integrations API keyA secret token that identifies and authorizes an application when it calls an API, granting whatever access the key is configured to allow.Integrations Approval gateA checkpoint in a workflow that pauses execution until a designated person approves or rejects the pending action before it proceeds.Workflow Audit trailA chronological, tamper-evident record of the actions taken in a system, capturing what happened, when, and by whom, so activity can be reviewed and verified.Data Auto-renewal clauseA contract clause that extends the agreement automatically for successive terms unless the customer provides written cancellation notice by a specified deadline.Procurement & Legal Autonomous agentAn AI system that pursues a goal with minimal step-by-step human direction, deciding its own actions to reach the outcome.Agents Batch processingThe processing of work in grouped sets, typically on a schedule, rather than handling each item individually the moment it arrives.Workflow Browser agentAn AI agent that controls a web browser to navigate pages, fill forms, click, and extract information, automating tasks on websites that lack an API.Agents Business process automation (BPA)The automation of complete business processes end to end across systems and departments, rather than isolated individual tasks.Workflow Chain-of-thoughtA pattern in which a model produces intermediate reasoning steps on the way to an answer, improving accuracy on problems that require multiple dependent steps.AI & Automation Citizen developerA non-engineer who builds applications or automations using no-code or low-code tools rather than traditional programming.Workflow COBRAA federal law requiring employers with twenty or more employees to offer continued health coverage to terminated employees and qualifying dependents.HR & Compliance Cold emailUnsolicited outbound email sent to a prospect with whom the sender has no prior relationship, aimed at starting a business conversation.Sales & GTM Computer-use agentAn AI agent that operates software through its graphical interface, viewing the screen and controlling the mouse and keyboard as a person would.Agents Conditional logicRules that let a workflow branch to different steps based on the data at hand, so a single workflow can handle multiple cases rather than one fixed path.Workflow ConnectorA prebuilt, reusable integration to a specific application that handles its authentication and API details so it can be used in a workflow without custom development.Integrations Context windowThe maximum amount of text, measured in tokens, that a model can take as input and attend to when producing a single response.AI & Automation Contract lifecycle management (CLM)The management of a contract through its entire lifecycle, from drafting and negotiation through approval, signature, and ongoing obligation and renewal tracking.Finance & Procurement CRMA Customer Relationship Management system: the system of record that stores an organization's contacts, accounts, deals, and interaction history.Sales & GTM Customer churnThe rate at which customers stop doing business with a company over a given period, whether by cancelling, not renewing, or lapsing.Support Customer satisfaction (CSAT)A metric that measures how satisfied a customer was with a specific interaction or experience, typically captured by a short survey immediately afterward.Support Customer successThe proactive function focused on ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes with a product, thereby driving retention, expansion, and advocacy.Customer Success Data enrichmentThe general practice of augmenting existing records with additional attributes from external or third-party data sources to make them more complete and useful.Sales & GTM Data governanceThe framework of policies, roles, ownership, and controls that defines how an organization's data is managed, protected, and used.Data Data hygieneThe ongoing practice of keeping records accurate, complete, consistent, and current by continually correcting, completing, and de-duplicating them.Data Data pipelineA series of connected processing stages that move data from one or more sources to a destination, transforming and validating it along the way.Data Data residencyA requirement that data be stored and processed within a specific geographic location, typically to comply with legal, regulatory, or contractual obligations.Data Data syncThe process of keeping the same information consistent across two or more systems, so a change in one is reflected in the others.Integrations Data warehouseA central repository optimized for storing and analyzing large volumes of structured data consolidated from many source systems, primarily to support reporting and analytics.Data Dead letter queueA holding queue for messages or jobs that could not be processed successfully after their retries were exhausted, preserving them for later inspection.Workflow DeduplicationThe process of identifying and merging duplicate records so that each real-world entity is represented only once in a dataset.Data Digital workerAn AI system framed as owning a role or ongoing process, handling the work of that role end to end rather than performing a single scripted task.Agents Directed acyclic graph (DAG)A structure that models steps as nodes with directed dependency edges and no cycles, used to express which workflow steps depend on which others.Workflow DunningThe structured process of sending escalating communications to customers to collect overdue payments, from early reminders through firmer notices.Finance & Procurement Email deliverabilityThe measure of whether sent email actually reaches recipients' inboxes rather than being filtered to spam or blocked entirely.Sales & GTM Email warmupThe practice of gradually increasing sending volume from a new email domain or mailbox to build a positive reputation with mailbox providers before sending at scale.Sales & GTM EmbeddingsA numeric vector representation of text (or other data) positioned so that items with similar meaning fall close together in vector space.AI & Automation Entity resolutionThe process of determining when different records refer to the same real-world entity, such as one customer or company represented several ways across systems.Data Escalation managementThe process of routing an issue to a higher support tier, specialist, or manager when it cannot be resolved at the current level, governed by defined triggers.Support Event-driven automationAutomation that runs in response to events emitted by systems as they happen, rather than on a fixed schedule that repeatedly checks for changes.Workflow Exception handlingThe part of a workflow that manages cases which fall outside the standard path, such as errors, missing data, or ambiguous inputs, rather than failing silently.Workflow Expansion revenueAdditional revenue generated from existing customers through upgrades, upsells, cross-sells, and increased usage, beyond their original purchase.Customer Success Fan-out / fan-inA workflow pattern where a step splits work into parallel branches (fan-out) and a later step waits for all of them to finish and combines the results (fan-in).Workflow Fine-tuningThe process of further training a pretrained model on a curated set of task-specific examples to adapt its behavior to a narrower use case.AI & Automation FirmographicsThe descriptive attributes of a company, such as industry, employee count, revenue, location, and structure, used to segment and target business accounts.Sales & GTM First response time (FRT)The elapsed time between a customer submitting a request and receiving the first human or automated response to it.Support Foundation modelA large model pretrained on broad, general data that serves as a reusable base which downstream applications adapt through prompting, tool use, or fine-tuning.AI & Automation Frontier modelOne of the most capable general-purpose AI models available at a given moment, defining the current ceiling for reasoning, instruction-following, and generation quality.AI & Automation Function callingThe mechanism by which a model produces a structured request to call a named function with typed arguments, which the surrounding system executes.Agents GDPRThe European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, governing how the personal data of individuals in the EU is collected, processed, protected, and shared.Compliance GroundingThe practice of tying a model's output to specific, verifiable source material so that each claim can be traced back and checked.AI & Automation GuardrailsThe constraints and checks that keep an AI system within safe and intended behavior, spanning input filtering, output validation, and scoped permissions.Agents HallucinationA confident but incorrect or fabricated output from a model, stated as if it were fact despite having no basis in the input or reality.AI & Automation Human-in-the-loopA design in which a human reviews, approves, or corrects an automated system's output at defined decision points before consequential actions proceed.Agents HyperautomationAn organizational strategy of automating as many processes as possible by combining multiple technologies, including AI, workflow tools, and integrations.Workflow I-9The US Form I-9 documents employee identity and work authorization, with Section 1 completed by the employee and Section 2 verified by the employer.HR & Compliance Ideal customer profile (ICP)A description of the type of company that is the best fit to buy from and get value from your product, defined by attributes like industry, size, and needs.Sales & GTM IdempotencyA property of an operation whereby performing it multiple times has the same effect as performing it once, making retries and replays safe.Workflow InferenceThe process of running a trained model on new input to produce an output, as distinct from training the model in the first place.AI & Automation IntegrationA connection between two software systems that lets them exchange data or trigger actions in one another, typically through an API.Integrations Intent dataBehavioral signals used to infer that an account or person is actively researching or considering a purchase in a given category.Sales & GTM Invoice processingThe end-to-end handling of a vendor invoice from receipt through payment, including data capture, validation, matching, approval, and posting.Finance & Procurement iPaaSA hosted platform that provides prebuilt connectors and tooling to integrate applications and move data between them without building each integration from scratch.Integrations ISO 27001An international standard specifying the requirements for an information security management system, used to certify that an organization manages security risk systematically.Compliance Joiner, mover, leaver (JML)The identity lifecycle process covering account creation on hire (joiner), access changes during tenure (mover), and account revocation on exit (leaver).IT & Identity Knowledge baseA curated, structured store of an organization's reference material, such as help articles, policies, and documentation, used as a trusted source for answers.AI & Automation Large language model (LLM)A neural network trained on large volumes of text to predict the next token, giving it the ability to understand and generate language across a wide range of tasks.AI & Automation Lead enrichmentThe process of adding missing attributes to a lead record, such as company size, industry, job title, and contact details, using external data sources.Sales & GTM Lead qualification (MQL/SQL)The process of determining whether a lead is worth pursuing, commonly staged as a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) that shows interest and a sales-qualified lead (SQL) that sales has validated as a real opportunity.Sales & GTM Lead routingThe process of automatically assigning incoming leads to the appropriate sales rep based on rules such as territory, segment, product, or round-robin balancing.Sales & GTM Lead scoringA method of ranking leads by their likelihood to convert, typically combining how well they fit the ideal customer profile with how much buying behavior they show.Sales & GTM Low-codeA development approach that uses visual tools to accelerate building while still allowing custom code to be dropped in for complex requirements.Workflow Master data management (MDM)The discipline of creating and maintaining a single, consistent, authoritative version of an organization's core data entities across all its systems.Data Message queueA component that holds messages between a producer and a consumer, letting them operate independently and enabling reliable, asynchronous processing.Integrations Model Context Protocol (MCP)An open standard that defines a uniform way for AI applications to connect to external tools and data sources, so any compliant client can use any compliant server.Agents Month-end closeThe recurring accounting process of finalizing a period's financial records, including reconciliations, adjusting entries, and producing financial statements.Finance & Procurement Multi-agent systemAn architecture in which multiple specialized AI agents coordinate, each handling part of a larger task, rather than a single agent doing everything.Agents Multimodal AIAI that can process and relate more than one type of input, such as text together with images, documents, or audio, within a single model.AI & Automation Net promoter score (NPS)A loyalty metric based on how likely customers are to recommend a company, calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.Support Net revenue retention (NRR)A metric measuring the revenue retained from existing customers over a period, including upgrades and expansion and net of downgrades and churn.Customer Success No-codeAn approach to building software through visual, configuration-driven interfaces that require no traditional programming.Workflow OAuthAn open standard for delegated authorization that lets a user grant an application scoped, revocable access to another service without sharing their password.Integrations OIDCAn identity layer built on OAuth 2.0 that adds a standardized identity token (id_token) for authenticating users, using JSON instead of XML.IT & Identity OrchestrationThe coordination of multiple steps, systems, or services into one coherent process, managing their ordering, dependencies, parallelism, errors, and shared state.Workflow Outbound prospectingThe proactive process of researching and reaching out to potential customers who have not yet expressed interest, in order to create new sales conversations.Sales & GTM Personally identifiable information (PII)Any data that can identify a specific individual, either on its own or combined with other data, such as name, email address, phone number, or government ID.Data Pipeline generationThe ongoing activity of creating enough qualified sales opportunities to feed the pipeline and support future revenue targets.Sales & GTM Planner-executorAn agent architecture that separates planning from execution: a planner decomposes the goal into steps, and an executor carries each step out.Agents Principle of least privilegeA security principle holding that each user, process, or system should be granted only the minimum access required to perform its function, and no more.Compliance Procure-to-pay (P2P)The end-to-end workflow from a purchase need being identified through the vendor being paid, covering requisition, sourcing, approval, PO, receipt, invoice, and payment.Finance & Procurement Prompt engineeringThe practice of designing and refining the instructions given to a model so that its output is reliable, well-formatted, and fit for the task.AI & Automation Prompt injectionAn attack in which adversarial text placed in a model's input attempts to override its original instructions and make it take unintended actions.AI & Automation Purchase order (PO)A formal document issued by a buyer committing to purchase specified goods or services at agreed quantities and prices, serving as the reference for later validation.Finance & Procurement Purchase requisitionAn internal request to purchase goods or services, submitted for approval before a purchase order is issued to a vendor.Finance & Procurement Quarterly Business Review (QBR)A scheduled review meeting between a customer success manager and the customer's executive sponsors, covering usage, outcomes, and strategic direction.Customer Success Rate limitingA control that caps how many requests a system will accept within a time window, protecting it from overload and enforcing fair usage.Workflow ReAct (reason + act)An agent pattern that interleaves reasoning steps with tool actions in a loop, so the agent thinks, acts, observes the result, and reasons again toward the goal.Agents Reasoning modelA model designed to work through a problem in multiple internal steps before answering, trading additional inference time for higher accuracy on complex tasks.AI & Automation ReconciliationThe process of comparing two sets of records to confirm they agree, and investigating and explaining any differences between them.Finance & Procurement Renewal riskThe likelihood that a customer will not renew their contract or subscription, assessed from signals like usage, engagement, support history, and sentiment.Customer Success Request for proposal (RFP)A formal procurement document soliciting structured bids from multiple vendors against the buyer's defined requirements and evaluation criteria.Procurement Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)A technique that retrieves relevant source material and supplies it to a model as context before generation, so the output is grounded in specific documents rather than the model's parametric memory.AI & Automation Retry logicThe policy governing how a workflow re-attempts a failed step, including how many times, how long to wait between attempts, and when to give up.Workflow Revenue operations (RevOps)The function that unifies the operations, data, processes, and tooling of marketing, sales, and customer success across the full revenue lifecycle.Sales & GTM Reverse ETLThe process of moving data from a central warehouse back into operational tools, so analytics and models built in the warehouse can drive action in the systems teams actually use.Data Robotic process automation (RPA)Automation that mimics a human user's interactions with software, such as clicks and keystrokes, to perform repetitive, rule-based tasks.Workflow Role-based access control (RBAC)An access-control model that assigns permissions to roles and users to roles, rather than assigning permissions directly to users.IT & Identity RunbookA documented set of steps for carrying out a routine or emergency operational task consistently, regardless of who performs it.Workflow SaaS spendThe total annual cost of all SaaS subscriptions across an organization, including sanctioned tools, shadow tools, and underused seats paid for but not used.Finance & Procurement Sales cadenceA defined sequence of outreach touchpoints, across channels and spaced over days or weeks, that a sales rep follows to engage a prospect systematically.Sales & GTM Sales development rep (SDR)The sales role focused on prospecting and qualifying new leads to generate and book meetings for the sales reps who close deals.Sales & GTM Sales engagementThe interactions a sales rep runs to move a prospect toward a deal, and the category of tooling that sequences, executes, and tracks those touchpoints.Sales & GTM SAMLAn XML-based standard for exchanging authentication assertions between an identity provider and a service provider, dominant in enterprise SSO.IT & Identity Scheduled job (cron)A workflow or task configured to run automatically on a fixed time schedule, such as every hour, nightly, or on a specific day.Workflow SCIMAn IETF standard for provisioning user records between identity providers and SaaS applications, covering create, read, update, delete operations on user and group objects.IT & Identity Self-serviceAn approach that enables customers to find answers and complete tasks on their own, without contacting a human, through help content, portals, and automation.Support Semantic searchA search approach that ranks results by meaning rather than exact keyword overlap, using embeddings to match a query to conceptually similar content.AI & Automation Service level agreement (SLA)A formal commitment to a defined standard of service, such as a maximum response or resolution time, often with consequences for a breach.Workflow Shadow ITSoftware, services, or devices used inside an organization without the IT team's knowledge or approval.IT & Identity Signal-based sellingA sales approach that triggers outreach off relevant, timely signals about an account, such as a funding round, leadership change, or product launch, rather than a fixed schedule.Sales & GTM Single source of truth (SSOT)The principle of maintaining one authoritative, definitive place for each piece of data, so all systems and people reference the same value rather than conflicting copies.Data Small language model (SLM)A compact language model that trades peak reasoning ability for lower latency and cost, well suited to well-scoped tasks like classification, extraction, and routing.AI & Automation SOC 1An AICPA audit report on a service organization's controls that are relevant to its customers' internal control over financial reporting.Compliance SOC 2An AICPA audit framework evaluating a service organization's controls across security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.Compliance Spend managementThe practice of gaining visibility into and controlling all of an organization's spending, so purchasing is deliberate, policy-compliant, and efficient.Finance & Procurement SPF, DKIM, DMARCThe three complementary email authentication standards that let a receiving server verify a message genuinely comes from the domain it claims and decide how to handle failures.Sales & GTM State machineA model of a process as a finite set of states with defined transitions between them, so the process can only move along explicitly allowed paths.Workflow Straight-through processing (STP)The processing of a transaction from initiation to completion entirely automatically, with no manual intervention on the standard path.Workflow Structured outputModel output constrained to a predefined machine-readable format, such as JSON matching a schema, so downstream software can consume it reliably.AI & Automation System of record (SOR)The application designated as the authoritative store for a particular type of data, whose values other systems treat as definitive.Data System promptThe standing instruction that establishes a model's role, rules, and constraints for a task, applied ahead of and separately from the user's per-request input.AI & Automation TechnographicsData describing the technologies and software products a company uses, employed to assess fit, integration needs, and competitive positioning.Sales & GTM Three-way invoice matchAn accounts payable control that reconciles three documents (the purchase order, the goods receipt, and the vendor invoice) before the invoice posts for payment.Finance Ticket deflectionThe practice of resolving a customer's question or issue through self-service or automation before it becomes a ticket that a human agent must handle.Support TokenThe unit of text a language model processes, typically a word or word fragment, used to measure both context limits and usage-based pricing.AI & Automation Tool useThe capability that lets a model call external functions, APIs, or services to retrieve information or take actions beyond generating text.Agents TriggerThe event or condition that initiates a workflow run, such as an incoming webhook, a schedule, a new record, or a received message.Workflow Vector databaseA database optimized to store embedding vectors and retrieve the ones most similar to a query vector quickly, serving as the retrieval layer for AI systems.AI & Automation Vendor managementThe ongoing process of onboarding, monitoring, and maintaining relationships with a business's suppliers, covering risk, performance, and contractual terms.Finance & Procurement W-4An IRS form that determines federal income tax withholding from an employee's wages, with state-specific equivalents required in most states.HR & Payroll Waterfall enrichmentAn enrichment strategy that queries multiple data providers in a prioritized sequence, falling through to the next only when the previous one lacks the needed attribute.Sales & GTM WebhookA mechanism by which one system automatically sends an HTTP request to a chosen URL the moment a defined event occurs, pushing data instead of waiting to be asked.Integrations Workflow automationThe automation of a defined sequence of steps across one or more systems, so a process runs from trigger to completion without manual hand-offs.Workflow

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