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AI

Model drift

Definition

Degradation in an automated system's output over time as the underlying model is updated, or as the real-world inputs move away from what it was tuned on. It arrives quietly, without an error message.

A classifier tuned in January against a provider's model can behave differently in June after a silent version update. Nothing breaks; the output is simply worse, and nobody notices until a downstream number moves.

The defence is a small held-out set of examples with known correct answers, run on a schedule, with an alert on the failure rate. It is a day of work and it is the difference between finding out from a test and finding out from a customer.

More in AI

Agentic workflow

A process where an AI system is given a goal rather than a script, and chooses its own sequence of tool calls to reach it. Distinguished from automation by being non-deterministic: the same input can produce a different route each run.

AI agent

An AI agent is a system that pursues a goal across multiple steps using tools — reading data, calling APIs, updating records — rather than producing a single response to a single prompt.

AI automation ROI

The payback calculation for an automation: hours recovered multiplied by fully loaded hourly cost, against build plus running cost. Frequency dominates the result — the same build against a process running twice a month rarely pays back at all.

AI observability

Logging and monitoring for AI systems: what went in, what came out, which tools were called, what it cost, and how often a human overrode it. Without it, a misbehaving automation is undiagnosable.

AI readiness

Whether a business has the process documentation, data quality and decision ownership for AI to add value. Readiness is mostly organisational: the constraint is almost never model capability.

Automation debt

The accumulated cost of automations nobody owns: undocumented flows, forgotten triggers, and scripts that break silently when an upstream field is renamed. The AI-era version of technical debt.

All 87 terms
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