Automation & AI terms, defined plainly.
The vocabulary that comes up constantly in workflow automation and AI engineering work — no jargon left unexplained.
Workflow Automation
Workflow automation is the use of software to run a multi-step business process — moving data, triggering actions and handling exceptions — without a person manually performing each step.
RPA (Robotic Process Automation)
RPA is software that mimics a person's clicks and keystrokes to operate an existing application's user interface, used when a system has no usable API to integrate with directly.
API Integration
API integration connects two systems by having one call the other's published interface directly — exchanging structured data without a person moving it by hand or a script imitating a user's clicks.
Webhook
A webhook is an automated message sent from one system to another the moment a specific event happens, letting the receiving system react immediately instead of repeatedly checking for updates.
LLM (Large Language Model)
An LLM is an AI model trained on large volumes of text that can read, generate and reason about natural language — used in production systems for tasks like structured data extraction, classification and drafting text.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
OCR is technology that converts an image of text — a scanned document, a photo, a PDF page — into machine-readable text, the first step in extracting data from documents that aren't already digital.
Multi-Tenancy
Multi-tenancy is a software architecture where one application instance serves multiple customers (tenants), each with data kept strictly isolated from the others despite sharing the same underlying system.
Durable Execution
Durable execution is a workflow design pattern where a running process can survive a crash, restart or network failure and resume correctly, rather than losing its state or repeating already-completed steps.