The Words People Use — Agent, Agentic, Copilot, Assistant

Ten words for overlapping things — agent, agentic AI, copilot, assistant, chatbot, workflow, RPA, orchestration, autonomous, AI employee — used inconsistently by vendors, analysts and bloggers. Rather than a private taxonomy you will be talked out of, this module hands you one disambiguating question that works whatever the vocabulary: which decisions does the model make at runtime, and which are fixed in code?

Content current as of 2026-09.

Lessons

  1. Why the words fight
  2. The words, one at a time
  3. The “agentic AI” question
  4. Translating a claim