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AI agent glossary

The vocabulary that comes up once you move from reading about agents to running them, or selling them to clients. Every entry is one sentence you could quote, then a short explanation including the part people usually get wrong, a worked example, and answers to two common questions.

25 terms

Agent babysitting: Agent babysitting is the recurring operational work an always-on agent creates: restarts, key rotation, spend checks, log reading, and host patching.
Agent environment: An agent environment is the isolated place an agent runs: its own filesystem, process space, credentials, and resource limits, separate from other agents.
Agent runtime: An agent runtime is the software harness that runs an agent: it holds the loop, manages context, and exposes the tools the agent is allowed to call.
Agent template: An agent template is a pre-built agent definition with a job, a schedule, and a set of tools already configured, so deploying it produces a working agent immediately.
AI agent: An AI agent is a program that uses a language model to decide which steps to take toward a goal, and can call tools to carry those steps out.
AI automation retainer: An AI automation retainer is a recurring monthly fee a client pays an agency to keep its AI agents running, maintained, and improved after the initial build.
AI share of voice: AI share of voice is the portion of all brand mentions in AI answers to a fixed set of buyer prompts that go to your brand rather than to your competitors.
AI visibility tracking: AI visibility tracking is repeated measurement of how often AI engines such as ChatGPT and Perplexity mention and cite a brand when answering buyer questions.
Always-on agent: An always-on agent is one that stays running continuously so it can act on schedules and triggers without a person starting it.
Approval mode: Approval mode is a setting where an agent pauses before a specified action and waits for a human to sign off before carrying it out.
BYOK (bring your own key): BYOK means connecting your own model provider API key to a platform, so model usage is billed to you by the provider instead of through the platform.
Client environment: A client environment is an isolated place where one client's agents run, with that client's own files and credentials, kept apart from every other client.
Done-for-you AI automation: Done-for-you AI automation is a service where an agency builds, runs, and maintains AI agents for a client, who receives the results without operating anything.
Generative engine optimization (GEO): Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a brand more likely to be mentioned and cited in answers from AI engines such as ChatGPT.
Managed agent hosting: Managed agent hosting is a service that provisions and operates the environments agents run in, so the customer configures agents rather than servers.
MCP server: An MCP server is a program that exposes tools, data, or prompts to an AI agent over the Model Context Protocol, a shared standard for connecting agents to external systems.
Model drift: Model drift is when an agent's output quality changes without its configuration changing, because the underlying model, an API, or a data source changed instead.
Multi-agent team: A multi-agent team is a group of agents that run together and communicate, each handling part of a task rather than one agent handling all of it.
Secret vault: A secret vault is encrypted storage for the credentials an agent needs, injected at runtime so keys are never written into prompts, code, or configuration files.
Self-hosting: Self-hosting means running an agent on infrastructure you own and operate, such as your own machine or a VPS, rather than on a platform that operates it for you.
Silent failure: A silent failure is when an agent stops working without producing any error, so its absence looks identical to a quiet day with nothing to report.
Spend cap: A spend cap is a limit on what an agent can spend on model usage, and a useful one halts execution at the limit rather than sending a notification.
Trigger: A trigger is an event that causes an agent run to start, such as an incoming message, an inbound webhook, or a scheduled time being reached.
Unattended execution: Unattended execution means an agent runs on a schedule or trigger with nobody present to watch it, approve its steps, or intervene.
White-label AI agents: White-label AI agents are agents an agency runs on another company's platform and sells to its clients as its own service, under its own price and invoice.