REFERENCE
Technology Glossary
Plain-language definitions for founders and teams building with AI, Salesforce, and modern engineering.
A
AI Agent
An AI system that can take autonomous actions, use tools, and complete multi-step tasks on behalf of a user or organization, rather than just generating a single response.
AI Governance
The policies, controls, and oversight structures an organization puts in place to ensure AI systems are used safely, fairly, and in compliance with legal and ethical standards.
AI Hallucination
When an AI language model generates output that sounds confident and plausible but is factually incorrect, fabricated, or unsupported by its source data.
API-First Architecture
A software design approach in which APIs are designed and built as the primary interface before any other layer, enabling products to be integrated, extended, and automated from day one.
C
Change Management (Healthcare IT)
The structured process of preparing clinical and administrative staff to adopt new technology systems, with particular attention to the safety, workflow, and regulatory constraints specific to healthcare environments.
CI/CD
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery: the practice of automatically building, testing, and deploying code changes as they are made, rather than in large periodic releases.
Context Window
The maximum amount of text a language model can process at once in a single interaction, including the conversation history, instructions, and any retrieved documents.
E
EHR (Electronic Health Record)
A digital system that stores and manages patient health information across a care organization, serving as the authoritative clinical record for diagnosis, treatment, and care coordination.
Einstein Trust Layer
Salesforce's built-in AI security and data governance framework that controls how data is handled when Salesforce products invoke large language models, including data masking and zero-retention guarantees.
Engineering Velocity
A measure of how quickly an engineering team can ship reliable software, often expressed as the rate of meaningful output delivered per unit of time.
EU AI Act
The European Union's comprehensive regulation on artificial intelligence, which classifies AI systems by risk level and imposes requirements ranging from transparency obligations to outright prohibitions.
F
FHIR
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources: the international standard for exchanging healthcare information electronically between systems, enabling different health IT platforms to share patient data reliably.
Fine-Tuning
The process of further training a pre-trained AI model on a smaller, domain-specific dataset to adapt its behavior for a particular task or context.
Foundation Model
A large AI model trained on broad data at scale that serves as a base for building specialized AI applications, either through prompting, fine-tuning, or integration with external tools.
Fractional CTO
A senior technology executive who works with a company on a part-time or project basis, providing CTO-level leadership without the cost or commitment of a full-time hire.
H
Headless Architecture
A software pattern that separates the backend system managing content or data from the frontend layer that displays it, with the two communicating through an API.
HIPAA
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a US federal law that sets standards for protecting sensitive patient health information from disclosure without consent.
M
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
The smallest version of a product that delivers enough value to real users to generate meaningful feedback, without building features that are not yet needed.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
An open standard developed by Anthropic that defines how AI models connect to external tools, data sources, and services in a consistent, interoperable way.
Multi-Agent System
An AI architecture in which multiple specialized AI agents collaborate on a task, with each agent handling a specific role and coordinating with others to produce a combined result.
P
PHI (Protected Health Information)
Any individually identifiable health information that relates to a person's past, present, or future physical or mental health condition, treatment, or payment for healthcare.
Prompt Injection
A security attack in which malicious input causes an AI system to ignore its instructions or take unintended actions, by embedding instructions inside user-provided content.
S
Salesforce Agentforce
Salesforce's AI agent platform that enables organizations to build and deploy autonomous AI agents directly within the Salesforce ecosystem.
Salesforce Flow
Salesforce's primary automation tool, which allows admins and developers to build complex business process automation inside Salesforce without writing code.
Salesforce Health Cloud
Salesforce's CRM platform built specifically for healthcare and life sciences, designed to manage patient and member relationships across clinical, administrative, and engagement workflows.
Shadow AI
The use of AI tools by employees without the knowledge or approval of their organization's IT or security teams, creating compliance, data, and governance risks.
System Prompt
Instructions provided to an AI language model before a conversation begins that define its role, behavior, constraints, and context for that session.
T
Technical Co-Founder
A founding team member with deep technical expertise who leads the engineering and product architecture of a startup, typically as the first CTO.
Technical Debt
The accumulated cost of shortcuts, outdated decisions, and deferred improvements in a codebase that slow down future development and increase the risk of failures.
Technical Due Diligence
A structured evaluation of a company's technology, engineering team, architecture, and technical practices, typically conducted before an investment, acquisition, or major partnership.
Technical Roadmap
A forward-looking plan that describes the sequence of engineering investments, infrastructure improvements, and capability milestones an organization intends to pursue over a defined time horizon.