---
title: "Glossary · Volcanic Minds"
description: "Deployer, guardrail, agentic, RAG: the words we use in a specializt sense, spelled out in full, with the page where they come up."
url: "https://volcanicminds.com/en/glossary"
lang: "en"
type: "first_level_page"
updated: "2026-10-02"
alternate: "https://volcanicminds.com/glossary"
---

# Glossary

The words we use in a specializt sense, spelled out in full. If one appears in an article with a dotted underline, this is the definition.

- **Agentic**: Of a system that does not just answer, but decides which tools to use and in what order to reach a goal. The difference with a prompt is that the path is not written by the person asking.
- **CLS**: The measure of how much the content moves while the page loads. Below 0.1 is considered good; you get there by reserving the space for images before they arrive.
- **CRM**: The record of who is a customer and who might become one: contacts, deals, quotes, exchanges. It earns its place when the same information lives in three inboxes and nobody can say where a deal stands.
- **Deployer**: Whoever uses an artificial intelligence system under their own authority, in the course of a professional activity. Not whoever builds it: whoever puts it into service. It is the role the AI Act places most of the practical obligations on.
- **ERP**: The system that holds a company's administrative and operational processes together: orders, stock, purchasing, invoicing, sometimes production and people. Custom software usually grows where the standard ERP stops, not in its place.
- **Guardrail**: A constraint that limits what an AI system can do or answer, applied before the output reaches the person who asked for it. It is not a suggestion inside the prompt: it is a check that can refuse an answer.
- **LLM**: A language model trained on large amounts of text. It knows a lot in general and little about a private domain: that is the reason RAG exists.
- **MES**: The system that runs production while it happens: work orders, progress, machine stops, scrap. It sits between the ERP, which says what to produce, and the machines that produce it.
- **MRP**: The calculation of what is needed to produce and when to order it: materials, quantities, lead times. It is the part of the ERP that turns a production plan into a purchase list with a date on it.
- **Multi-tenant**: An architecture where a single installation serves several customers while keeping their data separate. The alternative is one copy per customer, which costs less to design and far more to keep up to date.
- **NDA**: The agreement in which two parties undertake not to disclose what they tell each other. We sign it before talking about a project when the project itself is confidential.
- **Orchestration**: The coordination of several agents, tools and steps in a flow that has a state, an order and checkpoints. You need it when a task does not fit into a single call to the model.
- **PII**: The data that leads back to a person: name, email, phone number, device identifiers, sometimes an IP address. Recognising it is the first step in deciding where it may live and for how long.
- **RAG**: An approach where the model, before answering, retrieves the relevant passages from a data source made available to it, and answers on those. It cuts down made-up answers because it ties the output to a text that exists.
- **RBAC**: Granting permissions by role rather than by person: what a role can do is described once, and people inherit the permissions of the role they hold. Moving somebody to another job becomes one line instead of a review of every permission.
- **Single-tenant**: An architecture where each customer has a dedicated, standalone installation with their own data. It costs less to design but much more to update, in exchange for the highest level of customization and security.
- **SLA**: The written commitment on how the service runs: how fast a report is answered, how fast it is resolved, how much unavailability is acceptable. Without numbers it is not an agreement, it is a promise.
- **Slice**: In the CMS, a typed content block that writers put together to build a page. Each slice matches a component in the design system: it is the point where editorial work and design meet.
- **WCAG**: The international guidelines for the accessibility of web content, organized in three conformance levels: A, AA and AAA. This site conforms to level AA and meets a good part of level AAA: the status criterion by criterion is in the accessibility statement.

## From definitions to your project.

If one of these terms concerns a system you have to build or choose, tell us where you are starting from.

- [Let's talk about your project](/en/contacts)