AI glossary · Fundamentals
Artificial intelligence
In one sentence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the branch of computing that builds systems able to do tasks we associate with human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognising images or making decisions, by learning patterns from data.
Also known as: AI · A.I. · machine intelligence
What is artificial intelligence?
The term was coined in 1956 for a research workshop at Dartmouth College in the US. For decades, AI mostly meant hand-written rules: “if this happens, do that”. That worked for closed problems like chess, but broke down as soon as things got messy, like understanding a sentence, a photo or a regional accent.
Put it to work
AI agents that look after your customers
From €49/mo + VAT
Voice, WhatsApp and email with the phone line included: agent, numbers and CRM in one fee.
See plans and pricingThe shift came when systems started learning from examples instead of following rules. That’s machine learning, and its many-layered variant, deep learning, sits behind almost everything we now call AI: voice typing on your phone, spam filters and chat assistants.
Related to this term
UTIO agents
- Available 24/7 in 26 languages
- Set it up yourself for €0: built from your website
- 14-day free trial, no card needed
From €49/mo + VAT
See plans and pricingHow it works
Most AI today follows the same pattern:
- Data. You gather a collection of examples, a dataset: text, audio, images or sales records.
- Training. An algorithm adjusts an AI model until it gets those examples right. The result is a program with millions of learned internal values.
- Use. The trained model receives new data and produces an output: a prediction, a label or a piece of text. This stage is called inference.
Generative AI is the family that creates new content. It’s what brought AI into everyday conversation from late 2022, through chat assistants built on language models.
Example
A small accountancy practice in Leeds gets the same emails and calls every week in the run-up to the Self Assessment deadline: which documents to send, when the return is due, can the appointment move. Without AI, someone in the office sorts and answers all of it by hand.
With AI, a system reads each email, works out what it’s about and drafts a reply using the practice’s own information. A voice agent handles the simple calls and passes anything sensitive to an accountant. The AI doesn’t make decisions for the practice: it takes the repetitive work off the team.
What it means for your business
For a small business, useful AI isn’t a research project. It’s an AI agent that answers the phone, WhatsApp or email with your business information and logs every conversation in the CRM.
That’s what UTIO does: the voice agent, WhatsApp agent and email agent include the AI in the monthly plan, so you never pick models or count tokens. They start in draft mode, so nothing goes out without your approval until you choose to give them more room. The tasks they already handle in production are listed under verticals.
Frequently asked questions
What are the main types of AI?
A practical split is by what the system does: predictive AI that classifies or forecasts (spotting fraud), perceptive AI that recognises speech or images, and generative AI that creates text, images or audio. All AI in use today is 'narrow': it handles specific tasks. General AI that can match people at any intellectual task does not exist yet.
Is AI actually intelligent?
Not in the human sense. An AI system computes: it learns statistical patterns from its data and applies them to new cases. The results can be very useful, but it has no intentions, awareness or understanding of the world the way a person does.
What's the difference between AI and machine learning?
AI is the goal: machines that perform intelligent tasks. Machine learning is the most common way of getting there today: instead of hand-written rules, the system learns from examples. All machine learning is AI, but not all AI is machine learning.
Related terms
- Machine learning
Machine learning is the branch of AI in which a system learns to do a task from examples, rather than following hand-written rules, and gets better as it sees more data.
- Generative AI
Generative AI is artificial intelligence that creates new content, such as text, images, audio, video or code, from an instruction, using models trained on huge numbers of examples of that kind of content.
- AI model
An AI model is the program you get by training an algorithm on data: a set of learned parameters that, given a new input, produces an output such as a prediction, a label, a piece of text or an image.
- AI agent
An AI agent is a system that uses a language model to understand a request, decide which steps to take and carry them out with real tools, such as your calendar or CRM, until the task is done rather than just replying.
- AGI
AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a hypothetical AI able to learn and perform almost any intellectual task a person can, with the same flexibility. There is no universally agreed definition and no system widely accepted as AGI.
Updated on