RevOps & AI Glossary

Agentic AI describes AI systems that pursue a goal across multiple steps - planning, making decisions, calling tools and APIs, and taking actions - rather than producing a single response to a single prompt. The distinguishing trait is autonomy over a workflow, not just fluency in language.

An AI agent is a software system that uses an AI model to complete a defined job end to end - reading inputs, making decisions, and taking actions across your tools and systems - with limited or no human intervention for each step.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring and writing content so AI answer engines - ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude - can extract, trust, and cite it directly when they answer a user's question, rather than optimizing purely for a ranked list of blue links.

CRM hygiene is the ongoing practice of keeping the data in your customer relationship management system accurate, complete, deduplicated, and consistently formatted, so that people, reports, and automations can all trust it as a single source of truth.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total revenue a business can expect to earn from a single customer over the entire relationship. It tells you how much a customer is worth, which in turn sets how much you can afford to spend to acquire and retain one.

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is the plan for how a company reaches its target customers and converts them into revenue. It defines who you are selling to, what you are offering, which channels you use to reach them, and the repeatable sales and marketing motion that turns interest into closed business.

A large language model (LLM) is an AI model trained on very large amounts of text to understand and generate human language and to follow instructions. It is the reasoning engine behind modern chatbots, copilots, and AI agents - for example Claude, GPT, and Gemini.

Lead scoring is the practice of ranking prospects by how likely they are to become customers, using a combination of fit (how well they match your ideal customer) and behavior (how they engage with your content and product), so sales can focus on the leads most likely to close.

Marketing automation is the use of software to run repetitive marketing tasks - email nurture sequences, lead scoring, list segmentation, and campaign workflows - automatically, triggered by rules and prospect behavior rather than manual effort.

Pipeline velocity is a measure of how quickly revenue moves through your sales pipeline. It combines four inputs - the number of active opportunities, the average win rate, the average deal size, and the length of the sales cycle - into a single view of how fast your pipeline converts to cash.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a technique that lets an AI model answer questions using your own documents and data. At query time it retrieves the most relevant content from your knowledge base and feeds it to the model as context, so the model can respond with your information without being retrained on it.

Revenue Operations (RevOps) is the practice of aligning sales, marketing, and customer success under a single operating model, shared data layer, and common set of metrics, so a company can grow revenue predictably instead of in disconnected silos.

A system of record (SOR) is the authoritative source of truth for a specific type of business data - the one system that every other tool, report, and team defers to for that information. For example, the CRM is usually the system of record for customer and deal data, and the ERP for financial data.

Workflow automation is the use of software to run a defined sequence of business steps automatically - moving data between systems, triggering actions, and removing the manual handoffs that slow work down and introduce errors.