Glossary

AI Chatbot (AI Chat Agent)

An AI chatbot — more accurately, an AI chat agent — is an AI agent that interacts with users through text: web chat, WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, Teams, or social messaging.

"AI chatbot" is often used loosely to describe anything from a rule-based FAQ widget to a sophisticated governed agent. In enterprise contexts, the distinction matters: modern AI chat agents are grounded in a knowledge base via retrieval, call tools to take real actions in connected systems, and are bounded by an explicit policy layer.

A well-built AI chat agent runs the same observe-reason-act loop as any other AI agent, but on a text channel. It can maintain context across turns and across channels (a customer who starts on web chat and continues over WhatsApp stays known), and escalates to human support on low-confidence or policy-sensitive conversations.

Enterprise AI chat agents typically integrate with helpdesks (Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk), CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot), and commerce platforms (Shopify, BigCommerce) to handle inquiries end-to-end rather than just routing them.

See also
  • AI Agent— An AI agent is a software system that uses a large language model to perceive its environment, reason about tasks, and take actions in external systems on behalf of a user.
  • AI Voice Agent— An AI voice agent is an AI agent that interacts with users through voice — answering inbound calls, placing outbound calls, and conversing in real time.
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)— Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is an architecture that grounds a language model's responses in a specific knowledge base by retrieving relevant passages at inference time and conditioning the response on them.
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More terms in the glossary

AI Agent

An AI agent is a software system that uses a large language model to perceive its environment, reason about tasks, and take actions in external systems on behalf of a user.

AI Voice Agent

An AI voice agent is an AI agent that interacts with users through voice — answering inbound calls, placing outbound calls, and conversing in real time.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is an architecture that grounds a language model's responses in a specific knowledge base by retrieving relevant passages at inference time and conditioning the response on them.

Multi-Agent Orchestration

Multi-agent orchestration is the practice of coordinating multiple specialized AI agents to accomplish a task that is too complex or too broad for a single agent.

Constitutional AI

Constitutional AI is an approach to training and deploying AI systems in which model behavior is guided by an explicit written set of principles — a "constitution" — rather than only by reinforcement from human feedback.

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for connecting AI agents to the tools, data sources, and prompts they need, through a consistent client-server protocol.

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Enterprise AI Agents

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