By Alex Myers, AI Technical Literacy and Workflow Strategy Consultant. 40+ AI systems deployed, 6 certifications. Published 2026-10-21
Reference
AI adoption glossary
The terms I use when I audit AI work, defined in plain language and in the way I mean them. Each definition is short enough to quote and precise enough to check against your own organisation.
- The Last Mile
- The distance between an agent that can do almost anything and a person who knows what to ask it for. Capable agents became available to everyone in 2026, which made the remaining difficulty invisible rather than absent.Read the full definition
- The Install Trap
- The belief that value arrives when an agent runs. Work-automation agents made installation a weekend task; deciding what they own and whether they pay off is still the work.Read the full definition
- The Accountability Gap
- The space between AI outputs and business results. Where AI adoption stalls because no one owns the outcome.Read the full definition
- The Human Architect
- The role that closes the Accountability Gap. Translates AI output into business outcome. Found through Psychology-Led Adoption profiling, not job title.Read the full definition
- Pilot-itis
- The disease where AI pilots succeed in isolation and never scale to production. 67% of AI initiatives never make it past pilot stage.Read the full definition
- Psychology-Led Adoption
- Address human barriers to AI adoption before technical ones. Uses data-driven profiling to identify the 5% who naturally embrace uncertainty.Read the full definition
- Results Thinkers
- The top 5% who ask "What outcome do I need?" instead of "What can AI do?" Your highest-leverage asset for driving organizational change.Read the full definition
- AI Technical Literacy
- The working knowledge of what an AI system is good at, where it reliably fails, and how to direct it. Held by the person doing the work, so it survives a change of vendor.
- AI agent
- A model given a goal and the ability to act across tools and steps without a person driving each one. Installing one is a weekend task. Deciding what it owns is the work.
A definition that survives contact with a real decision is the only useful kind. If one of these reads differently inside your organisation, that difference is usually the problem worth fixing first.