Glossary
These are plain definitions of the terms used across the site. Each one comes from an essay and links back to it.
A
- AI agent for accounts receivable
Software that reads where an invoice or account stands, picks the next step under finance policy, takes that step in real systems like email, the ERP, and payment tools, and keeps going until cash posts or a person has to step in.
- AI cash application agent
An AI agent that matches remittance to open items and posts to the ERP when the match clears rules set in advance, and sends everything outside those rules to a person.
- Assist, Automate, Advise, Configure
Four categories of AI agents in finance, where Assist helps people do tasks, Automate completes routine tasks end to end, Advise recommends actions nobody was looking for, and Configure changes the systems and processes themselves.
- autonomy tax
The temporary cost of human-in-the-loop approval on agent decisions, paid in human time and delay until the team works out how to remove the checkpoint.
C
- context layer
The operational knowledge an AI agent needs to work well in one business, covering how that business runs, its patterns, where its exceptions live, and its constraints.
D
- document agent
An invoice or contract treated as an agent that knows its own situation, holds goals, senses events around it, and decides what to do next, instead of sitting as a passive data record.
S
- shared brain
A git-backed vault of markdown files that LLM agents keep up for a whole team, holding tasks, ideas, competitive intelligence, specs, objectives, people profiles, and agent memory in one linked graph.
- stop condition
The rule that makes an agent halt, escalate, or pass the work to a person.