Glossary of Terms and Acronyms

Every acronym and specialized term used in this document, defined in one place for quick lookup. Terms are also defined inline at their first use in the running text; this glossary is the reference copy.

• A2A (Agent2Agent): An open protocol, originally developed by Google and now governed by the Linux Foundation, that lets independent AI agents discover each other's capabilities and communicate to delegate and coordinate tasks.
• ABAC (Attribute-Based Access Control): An access-control model that grants permissions based on attributes of the user, resource, and context, rather than fixed roles.
• ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol): An emerging standard for agent-initiated commerce transactions, alongside AP2, still consolidating as of this writing.
• AI (Artificial Intelligence): Used throughout this document as an umbrella term; specific mechanisms (agents, LLMs, RAG, and so on) are defined individually where precision matters.
• AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol): A protocol for agent-initiated payment transactions.
• API (Application Programming Interface): A defined interface that lets one piece of software call another's functionality directly, without a user interface.
• APIM (API Management): Infrastructure for managing, securing, and monitoring API traffic, including AI gateway traffic.
• APM (Application Performance Monitoring): Tooling that tracks the health, latency, and errors of running software systems.
• AUP (Acceptable Use Policy): A published policy telling employees what AI tools they may use, on what data, and under what constraints.
• AWS (Amazon Web Services): Amazon's cloud computing platform.
• B2B (Business-to-Business): Commerce or transactions conducted between businesses rather than with individual consumers.
• B2C (Business-to-Consumer): Commerce or transactions conducted between a business and individual consumers.
• BCG (Boston Consulting Group): A management consulting firm cited for AI value-tracking research.
• BIRD-SQL (Big Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQL Evaluation): A benchmark for evaluating a model's ability to translate natural language into correct SQL queries.
• BM25 (Best Matching 25): A keyword-ranking algorithm used in search and hybrid retrieval systems.
• BPM (Business Process Management): A discipline and toolset for modeling, automating, and improving structured business processes.
• CD (Continuous Delivery/Deployment): The practice of automatically preparing or releasing every validated code change to production; paired with CI as "CI/CD."
• CFO (Chief Financial Officer): The executive responsible for an organization's financial management.
• CI (Continuous Integration): The practice of frequently merging and automatically testing code changes; paired with CD as "CI/CD."
• CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency): The U.S. federal agency responsible for cybersecurity and infrastructure protection guidance.
• CISO (Chief Information Security Officer): The executive responsible for an organization's information security program.
• CRM (Customer Relationship Management): Software systems that manage an organization's interactions with current and prospective customers.
• CUA (Computer-Using Agent): An AI agent that acts directly on a computer's graphical interface or browser, viewing screenshots and issuing mouse/keyboard actions, rather than calling structured APIs.
• CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures): A public catalog of disclosed software security vulnerabilities, each with a unique tracking identifier (e.g., CVE-2025-6514).
• DLP (Data Loss Prevention): Controls that detect and block sensitive data from leaving an organization's systems, including through AI prompts and outputs.
• DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment): A Google-affiliated research program that produces the industry's leading evidence-based research on software delivery performance and, since 2024-2025, AI-assisted engineering.
• EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response): Security tooling that monitors endpoint devices for threats and can trigger automated response actions.
• ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning): Integrated software systems (finance, HR, supply chain, and similar) that run an organization's core operational processes.
• EU (European Union): The political and economic union whose AI Act is a primary regulatory reference point in this document.
• FINOS (Fintech Open Source Foundation): A Linux Foundation project developing open-source standards and frameworks for financial services technology, including agent governance frameworks.
• FSE (Foundations of Software Engineering): A leading academic software engineering conference, cited here for peer-reviewed research on AI-assisted code migration.
• GCP (Google Cloud Platform): Google's cloud computing platform.
• GenAI (Generative AI): AI systems that generate new content (text, code, images, and so on) rather than only classifying or scoring existing content.
• GPAI (General-Purpose AI): A regulatory category under the EU AI Act covering foundation models not built for a single narrow purpose.
• GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer): OpenAI's family of large language models.
• GUI (Graphical User Interface): A visual, point-and-click interface, as distinct from a command-line or programmatic interface.
• HHEM (Hughes Hallucination Evaluation Model): Vectara's open model for scoring whether a generated answer is factually grounded in its source material.
• HR (Human Resources): The organizational function responsible for workforce management.
• HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol): The foundational protocol of the web, referenced here as a comparison point for newer agent-interoperability protocols.
• IAM (Identity and Access Management): Systems and policies that govern who (or what) can access which resources.
• ID (Identity/Identifier): Used in this document both generically and in named products (e.g., Microsoft Entra Agent ID).
• IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission): The international standards body that co-publishes standards such as ISO/IEC 42001 and ISO/IEC 27001 with the International Organization for Standardization.
• IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers): A professional association that publishes technical standards and research, including the ISTAS conference cited in this document.
• IP (Intellectual Property): Legal rights in creative and inventive work; a live risk area for AI-generated content and training data.
• ISO (International Organization for Standardization): The international standards body behind standards such as ISO/IEC 42001 (AI management systems) and ISO/IEC 27001 (information security).
• ISTAS (International Symposium on Technology and Society): An IEEE-affiliated conference, cited here for research on security degradation in iterative AI code generation.
• IT (Information Technology): The organizational function responsible for technology infrastructure and systems.
• JIT (Just-in-Time): In this document, just-in-time access: granting elevated permissions only for the duration of a specific approved action.
• JSON (JavaScript Object Notation): A lightweight, structured data format commonly used for API requests, responses, and model output schemas.
• KPI (Key Performance Indicator): A measurable value used to track progress toward a goal; referenced generically in discussions of measurement discipline.
• L1-L4 (Maturity Levels): The four-stage maturity scale (Experimental, Managed, Scaled, AI-Native) used throughout the Enterprise AI Capability Model to score organizational capability.
• LLM (Large Language Model): A machine learning model trained on large volumes of text to generate and reason over natural language; the technology underlying most modern AI agents and assistants.
• MCP (Model Context Protocol): An open standard, now governed by the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, for connecting AI models to external tools and data sources in a consistent way.
• METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research): An independent research organization known for a randomized controlled trial measuring real-world AI coding productivity effects.
• MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): Cited here as the affiliation behind the NANDA research initiative on enterprise AI pilot outcomes.
• M365 (Microsoft 365): Microsoft's cloud productivity suite (Office apps, Copilot, and related services).
• MTTR (Mean Time to Restore): A DORA software delivery metric measuring how long it takes to restore service after a failure.
• NANDA (Networked Agents and Decentralized AI): An MIT research initiative studying enterprise AI agent adoption and outcomes.
• NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research): A U.S. economic research organization, cited here for field-experiment research on AI productivity effects segmented by worker skill level.
• NHI (Non-Human Identity): A distinct, verifiable identity issued to an AI agent or automated workload, separate from any human user's credentials.
• NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology): The U.S. federal agency behind the AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF) and its Generative AI Profile, widely used as reference vocabulary for AI governance.
• NLP (Natural Language Processing): The field of computing concerned with processing and generating human language.
• NSA (National Security Agency): The U.S. federal agency that co-published, with CISA, security guidance on Model Context Protocol risk.
• OAuth: An open standard for delegated authorization, used (in its 2.1 revision) as the authorization model underlying several agent-to-agent and agent-identity protocols discussed in this document.
• OWASP (Open Worldwide Application Security Project): A nonprofit foundation that publishes widely adopted, community-developed application security guidance, including the LLM/Generative AI security Top 10 referenced throughout this document.
• PDF (Portable Document Format): A fixed-layout document file format, referenced here for source materials such as the NIST AI RMF.
• PII (Personally Identifiable Information): Data that can identify a specific individual, a primary concern for data loss prevention and privacy controls.
• PR (Pull Request): A request to merge a proposed code change into a shared codebase, subject to review.
• RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation): Giving a model access to an organization's own documents and data at query time, rather than relying only on what it learned in training.
• RAGAS (Retrieval Augmented Generation Assessment): An open-source framework for automatically evaluating RAG system output quality.
• RBAC (Role-Based Access Control): An access-control model that grants permissions based on a user's assigned role.
• RMF (Risk Management Framework): In this document, most often NIST's AI Risk Management Framework, a voluntary structure for identifying and managing AI risk across a system's lifecycle.
• ROI (Return on Investment): A measure of the value gained from an investment relative to its cost.
• RPA (Robotic Process Automation): Software "bots" that automate repetitive, rule-based digital tasks by mimicking user actions on existing interfaces.
• SaaS (Software as a Service): Software delivered and licensed as a hosted, subscription-based cloud service rather than installed on-premises.
• SAP: A major enterprise software vendor, referenced here for its Joule AI agents embedded across ERP functions.
• SAST (Static Application Security Testing): Automated analysis of source code to find security vulnerabilities without executing the program.
• SDK (Software Development Kit): A packaged set of tools, libraries, and documentation for building on a given platform or protocol.
• SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle): The end-to-end process of planning, building, testing, deploying, and maintaining software.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Techniques for improving a page's visibility in search results; referenced in this document only as an excluded source-quality category.
• SOC (Security Operations Center): The team and systems responsible for monitoring and responding to security incidents.
• SPIFFE (Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone): An open standard for issuing verifiable workload identities, increasingly extended to cover AI agents.
• SPIRE: The reference runtime implementation of the SPIFFE standard.
• SQL (Structured Query Language): The standard language for querying and managing relational databases.
• UI (User Interface): The means by which a person interacts with a software system.
• US (United States): Referenced primarily in the context of U.S. federal agencies and government reference frameworks (NIST, NSA, CISA).
• UX (User Experience): The overall experience and usability of a product or system from the user's perspective.
• VM (Virtual Machine): An isolated, software-based emulation of a computer system, commonly used to sandbox agent actions.

Additional Terms

• Agent (AI agent): A system that perceives its environment, reasons about what to do, takes an action through a tool, and observes the result, repeating until a task is complete.
• Agentic AI: AI systems built around the agent loop, as distinct from single-turn chat or classification systems.
• Context engineering: The discipline of designing the whole system around a model (what data it retrieves, what tools it can call, what history it carries), rather than focusing narrowly on prompt wording.
• Frontier model: The current highest-capability general-purpose models from the major AI labs.
• Groundedness: Whether a model's answer is actually supported by the retrieved source material, as distinct from output that is merely fluent and confident.
• Hallucination: Fluent, confident, but factually incorrect model output.
• Hub-and-spoke (operating model): An organizational pattern in which a central team owns shared platform and governance, while business-unit "spoke" teams own delivery.
• Prompt injection: An attack in which instructions hidden in content an AI processes hijack its behavior; direct if the user does it, indirect if a third party embeds it in data the AI later reads.
• Zero-trust (for agents): Treating every agent as potentially compromised and verifying its actions continuously, rather than trusting it once it is inside the organization's perimeter.