{ "answers": [ { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-RAG", "question": "What is RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)?", "answer": "RAG is a technique where a system first searches your own documents for the passages relevant to a question, then gives those passages to a language model as context so it answers from them. It is the standard way to make an AI assistant answer from company knowledge, with citations, instead of from whatever it memorised in training.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-rag/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-AN-AI-AGENT", "question": "What is an AI agent?", "answer": "An AI agent is a system that takes a goal rather than a single instruction, chooses among the tools or actions available to it, and carries out several steps before returning a result. The distinguishing feature is not intelligence but autonomy: the agent decides the path, where an ordinary automation follows one that was written in advance.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-an-ai-agent/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-AGENTIC-AI", "question": "What is agentic AI?", "answer": "Agentic AI describes systems where a model plans and acts over several steps, using tools and reacting to results, rather than producing one answer to one prompt. In a business context it usually means a workflow in which some decisions — classification, routing, next best step — are made at run time by a model instead of being hard-coded.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-agentic-ai/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-AN-LLM", "question": "What is a large language model (LLM)?", "answer": "A large language model is a model trained on very large amounts of text to predict language well enough to summarise, classify, extract, draft and reason over documents. It is a component, not a product. The business value comes almost entirely from the workflow built around it: what it is given, what it is allowed to do, and who checks the result.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-an-llm/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-A-CONTEXT-WINDOW", "question": "What is a context window?", "answer": "The context window is the amount of text a model can consider in a single request, measured in tokens — roughly three quarters of a word each. It covers the instructions, the supplied documents, the conversation so far and the answer. When the limit is reached, something has to be dropped, and what gets dropped decides the quality of the answer.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-a-context-window/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-AN-EMBEDDING", "question": "What is an embedding?", "answer": "An embedding turns a piece of text into a list of numbers that captures its meaning, so that passages about similar things end up close together in that numeric space. It is what allows a system to find the relevant paragraph in ten thousand documents even when the searcher used none of the same words.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-an-embedding/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-A-VECTOR-DATABASE", "question": "What is a vector database?", "answer": "A vector database stores embeddings and answers the question \"which stored passages are closest in meaning to this one?\" quickly, across millions of records. It is the retrieval engine behind semantic search and RAG, and it usually also stores the metadata you need to filter by — client, date, document type, permission.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-a-vector-database/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-PROMPT-ENGINEERING", "question": "What is prompt engineering?", "answer": "Prompt engineering is the practice of writing the instructions given to a language model so that it produces the output you need reliably — the role it is playing, the format it must return, the examples it should follow and the rules it must not break. In production systems the prompt is source code, and it deserves version control, review and tests.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-prompt-engineering/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-PROMPT-INJECTION", "question": "What is prompt injection?", "answer": "Prompt injection is an attack in which instructions hidden inside content that a model reads — an email, a PDF, a web page, a CV — attempt to override the system that is reading it. Because a language model cannot reliably tell instructions from data, any system that reads untrusted content and can also take actions is exposed by default.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-prompt-injection/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-FINE-TUNING", "question": "What is fine-tuning?", "answer": "Fine-tuning is further training of an existing model on your own examples so that it reliably adopts a format, a tone or a classification scheme. It changes behaviour, not knowledge. For the common requirement — \"the model should know our documents\" — retrieval is the correct and far cheaper answer.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-fine-tuning/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-HALLUCINATION-IN-AI", "question": "What is hallucination in AI?", "answer": "A hallucination is a confident output that is simply false — an invented citation, a plausible but wrong figure, a clause that does not exist in the contract. It is a property of how language models generate text, not a defect that a future version will remove, so production systems are designed to contain it rather than to wait for it to stop.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-hallucination-in-ai/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-HUMAN-IN-THE-LOOP", "question": "What is human-in-the-loop?", "answer": "Human-in-the-loop is a design in which the system prepares, proposes or drafts, and a named person approves before anything binding happens. It is what makes automated decision-making acceptable in regulated, financial and legal workflows, and it should be visible in the audit trail rather than implied.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-human-in-the-loop/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-DOCUMENT-INTELLIGENCE", "question": "What is document intelligence?", "answer": "Document intelligence is turning unstructured files — scans, PDFs, emails, forms, contracts — into structured fields a system can act on: dates, parties, amounts, obligations, missing items. It combines text extraction, layout understanding and language models, and it is judged field by field rather than document by document.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-document-intelligence/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-OCR", "question": "What is OCR?", "answer": "Optical character recognition converts an image of text — a scan, a photograph, a fax — into machine-readable characters. It is the first step for any document that is not already digital text, and the quality of that first step sets the ceiling for everything downstream.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-ocr/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-WORKFLOW-AUTOMATION", "question": "What is workflow automation?", "answer": "Workflow automation is software that carries a piece of work through its steps — intake, assignment, checks, approvals, notifications, completion — without a person moving it by hand. The value is not only speed: it is that the process becomes visible, consistent and auditable, so you can see where work is stuck.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-workflow-automation/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-BUSINESS-PROCESS-AUTOMATION", "question": "What is business process automation?", "answer": "Business process automation is the broader discipline of using software to run an end-to-end business process across systems and departments, rather than automating a single task. It normally combines integration between existing applications, rules, workflow, notifications and reporting, with people retained at the points that require judgement.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-business-process-automation/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-RPA", "question": "What is RPA (robotic process automation)?", "answer": "RPA is software that drives an existing user interface — clicking, typing, copying between screens — to automate a task in a system that offers no usable API. It works, and it is brittle by design: a layout change or a slow page can break it, so it suits legacy systems rather than new builds.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-rpa/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-AN-API", "question": "What is an API?", "answer": "An API is a defined way for one system to ask another for data or to perform an action, without a person or a screen in between. A REST API exposes those operations over the web at predictable addresses with predictable responses, which is what makes reliable integration possible.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-an-api/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-A-WEBHOOK", "question": "What is a webhook?", "answer": "A webhook is the reverse of an API call: instead of your system repeatedly asking whether something has happened, the other system sends a message to an address you provide the moment it does. It is how automations react in seconds rather than on a schedule.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-a-webhook/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-SYSTEM-INTEGRATION", "question": "What is system integration?", "answer": "System integration is making separate applications work as one: moving data between them, keeping them in agreement, and defining which one is authoritative when they disagree. In most automation projects it is the majority of the work and the majority of the risk.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-system-integration/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-IPAAS", "question": "What is iPaaS (integration platform as a service)?", "answer": "An iPaaS is a hosted platform that connects applications using ready-made connectors and visual flows, instead of custom code. It shortens straightforward integrations considerably and becomes expensive or limiting when the logic is genuinely bespoke, the volume is high, or the error handling needs to be precise.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-ipaas/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-IDEMPOTENCY", "question": "What is idempotency?", "answer": "An operation is idempotent when performing it twice has the same effect as performing it once. It is the property that stops a retried webhook from creating two invoices, or a double-clicked button from sending two payments, and any automation that touches money or records should be designed for it from the start.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-idempotency/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-A-CRM", "question": "What is a CRM?", "answer": "A CRM is the system of record for customers, contacts, opportunities and the history of the relationship. In automation projects it is usually both the source of truth and the destination, and most measurable wins come from making it accurate automatically rather than from replacing it.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-a-crm/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-AN-ERP", "question": "What is an ERP?", "answer": "An ERP is the system of record for finance, inventory, purchasing, and often manufacturing and HR. It is rarely replaced and rarely pleasant to change, so the practical question in most projects is how to integrate with it carefully rather than how to work around it.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-an-erp/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-SAAS", "question": "What is SaaS?", "answer": "SaaS is software delivered as a hosted service and paid for by subscription rather than installed and licensed. For a buyer it means no servers and continuous updates. For anyone building one it means committing to operations — uptime, upgrades, support, security and billing — not just to the first release.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-saas/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-MULTI-TENANCY", "question": "What is multi-tenancy?", "answer": "Multi-tenancy is one deployment serving many customer organisations with their data strictly separated. It is what makes a SaaS product economic to run, and the separation model has to be decided before the first line of data access is written, because retrofitting it is close to a rebuild.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-multi-tenancy/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-RBAC", "question": "What is RBAC (role-based access control)?", "answer": "RBAC assigns permissions to roles rather than to individuals, so what a person can see and do follows their job. In operations platforms it is not a settings screen but the product itself: ownership, visibility and hand-off rules are usually the thing being bought.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-rbac/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-SSO", "question": "What is SSO (single sign-on)?", "answer": "SSO lets people sign in to an application with an existing corporate identity — Microsoft Entra, Google Workspace, Okta — instead of another password. It is frequently a procurement requirement for internal tools, because it means access is removed centrally the day someone leaves.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-sso/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-AN-AUDIT-TRAIL", "question": "What is an audit trail?", "answer": "An audit trail is an append-only record of who did what, when, and to which record. It is what turns \"the system decided\" into something defensible, and it is far cheaper to design in at the start than to reconstruct from logs after a dispute.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-an-audit-trail/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-AN-MVP", "question": "What is an MVP?", "answer": "An MVP is the smallest version that puts a real workflow in front of real users and produces a real answer about whether it works. It is a decision-making device, not a discount: the scope is cut, the quality is not, because a version that breaks tells you nothing about whether the idea was sound.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-an-mvp/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-A-PROOF-OF-CONCEPT", "question": "What is a proof of concept?", "answer": "A proof of concept tests whether something is technically possible with your data and your constraints. It is not a small product: it has no users, it can be thrown away, and its only output is evidence. Confusing it with an MVP is one of the more expensive mistakes in AI projects.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-a-proof-of-concept/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-TECHNICAL-DEBT", "question": "What is technical debt?", "answer": "Technical debt is work deliberately deferred to ship sooner, and the ongoing cost of that decision. Debt is legitimate when it is named, dated and scheduled. It becomes a problem when it is invisible to the people approving the roadmap, who then cannot understand why everything is slowing down.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-technical-debt/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-OBSERVABILITY", "question": "What is observability?", "answer": "Observability is being able to answer, from outside a system, what it is doing and why — through logs, metrics, traces and alerts. For AI-assisted systems it also means recording the inputs, the retrieved context and the outputs that produced a given decision, because otherwise a complaint about one case cannot be investigated.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-observability/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-A-HEADLESS-CMS", "question": "What is a headless CMS?", "answer": "A headless CMS stores and manages content but does not render the website itself, serving the content over an API to whatever front end consumes it — a site, an app, a kiosk, several at once. It separates editing from presentation.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-a-headless-cms/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-WCAG", "question": "What is WCAG?", "answer": "The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the international standard for making web content usable by people with disabilities, organised into testable success criteria at three levels — A, AA and AAA. AA is the level named in most legislation and most public-sector procurement.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-wcag/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-SEO", "question": "What is SEO?", "answer": "Search engine optimisation is making a site technically sound, well structured and genuinely useful so search engines can crawl it, understand it and rank it for the queries that matter. It is the foundation the newer disciplines sit on, not an alternative to them.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-seo/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-GEO", "question": "What is GEO (generative engine optimisation)?", "answer": "GEO is making a brand and its subject matter clear enough that generative systems — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews — understand, summarise and cite it correctly. In practice it means unambiguous entity signals, quotable factual passages, and the same facts stated consistently wherever the brand appears.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-geo/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-AEO", "question": "What is AEO (answer engine optimisation)?", "answer": "AEO is structuring pages so that a direct question gets a direct answer: question-led headings, a short factual response before the supporting detail, and markup that identifies the question and its answer to machines. It optimises for being the answer rather than for being a result.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-aeo/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-STRUCTURED-DATA", "question": "What is structured data (schema markup)?", "answer": "Structured data is machine-readable labelling added to a page that states what it is — an organisation, a service, an article, a question and answer, a product, a video. It does not change what visitors see; it changes how confidently machines can interpret and reuse the page.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-structured-data/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-LLMS-TXT", "question": "What is llms.txt?", "answer": "llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a site that lists its most useful pages and says what each one covers, so an AI system reading the site has a clean map instead of inferring one from navigation. It is a convention rather than a standard, and it costs almost nothing to publish.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-llms-txt/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-CORE-WEB-VITALS", "question": "What are Core Web Vitals?", "answer": "Core Web Vitals are the field measurements Google takes of loading (Largest Contentful Paint), responsiveness (Interaction to Next Paint) and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift), collected from real visitors rather than a laboratory test. They are a ranking input and, more usefully, an accurate description of whether a site feels fast.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-core-web-vitals/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-A-TENDER", "question": "What is a tender?", "answer": "A tender is a formal process in which a buyer publishes a requirement and invites suppliers to submit priced, documented proposals against fixed criteria by a fixed deadline. It is deliberately rigid: the rules exist so that the award can be defended, which is why administrative errors disqualify strong bids.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-a-tender/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-TENDER-MANAGEMENT-SOFTWARE", "question": "What is tender management software?", "answer": "Tender management software runs the bid process on the supplier side: capturing opportunities, qualifying them, assigning owners, tracking documents and deadlines, reusing previous answers, routing internal review and recording the outcome. It is an operations system, not a document store.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-tender-management-software/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-AN-RFP", "question": "What is an RFP?", "answer": "A request for proposal is a document in which a buyer describes a requirement and asks suppliers to propose how they would meet it, with pricing, against stated evaluation criteria. Unlike a request for quotation, which asks only the price of a specified thing, an RFP invites the approach itself to be part of what is judged.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-an-rfp/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-BID-NO-BID", "question": "What is a bid/no-bid decision?", "answer": "A bid/no-bid decision is the deliberate judgement, made before any writing starts, about whether an opportunity is worth pursuing. It weighs fit against the requirement, how well placed any incumbent is, realistic win probability, the cost of bidding and what else that effort could be spent on.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-bid-no-bid/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-E-PROCUREMENT", "question": "What is e-procurement?", "answer": "E-procurement is the conduct of purchasing through electronic systems: publishing opportunities, receiving bids, running auctions, issuing purchase orders and processing invoices on a portal rather than on paper. For suppliers it usually means registering on a portal run by the buyer and submitting everything through it.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-e-procurement/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-A-DPA", "question": "What is a DPA (data processing agreement)?", "answer": "A data processing agreement is the contract term setting out what a supplier may do with personal data on your behalf: the purpose, the duration, where it is processed, who else touches it, what security applies and what happens at the end. Under GDPR it is required whenever a processor handles personal data for a controller.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-a-dpa/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-DATA-RESIDENCY", "question": "What is data residency?", "answer": "Data residency is which country or region your data is stored and processed in. It matters for regulated sectors and public-sector buyers, and it constrains hosting, backup locations and model choices — so it belongs in the first conversation of a project rather than the last.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-data-residency/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-PII", "question": "What is PII?", "answer": "PII is any data that identifies a person directly or in combination with other data — a name, an email address, an account number, a device identifier, sometimes a location trail alone. In AI projects the decisive question is not only where it is stored but whether it leaves your boundary when a model is called.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-pii/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" }, { "id": "AST-ANS-WHAT-IS-LEAST-PRIVILEGE", "question": "What is least privilege?", "answer": "Least privilege means granting every person, service and integration the narrowest access that lets it do its job, and no more. It is the cheapest security control available and the one most often skipped when a project is behind schedule.", "canonical": "https://astackra.com/glossary/what-is-least-privilege/", "confidence": "published-definition", "verifiedAt": "2026-10-08" } ] }