Glossary - Arun Saravanen

AI terms for ServiceNow people

Agent loop: A model working in steps: it calls a tool, reads the result and decides what to do next, until it finishes or hits a limit.
Context window: The most text a model can handle in one request, counted in tokens. It covers the instructions, retrieved passages, the conversation so far and the reply. Filling it up can bury the part that matters.
Embedding: A list of numbers, called a vector, that stands for the meaning of a piece of text. Texts with similar meanings get vectors that sit close together, which is how vector search finds related passages.
Eval: A fixed set of test questions, each with a known good outcome, run against an AI system so a regression shows up before users find it.
Faithfulness: Whether an output sticks to its source: no claims the source does not support and nothing that contradicts it.
Golden set: A trusted set of eval examples whose answers people have checked and agreed on. Kept small, it is cheap enough to run on every change.
Grounding: Tying each claim in an answer to a source passage a person can check. A grounded system says so when its sources do not cover the question.
Guardrail: A rule or check around an AI feature that limits what it takes in, does or shows, such as refusing when retrieval is weak or labeling AI-generated text.
Hallucination: A fluent, confident answer that is false or that its sources do not support. In a RAG system it often starts when retrieval quietly misses and the model fills the gap.
LLM: Large language model. A model trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next token (a word or part of a word), then tuned to follow instructions, so it can draft, summarize and answer questions.
LLM-as-judge: Using a language model to grade AI output against a rubric. Fast and cheap, but its scores still need human spot checks.
Parameter: A number inside a model that training adjusts, such as a weight or a bias. A model's size is usually counted in parameters.
RAG: Retrieval-augmented generation. The system finds passages that match a question, in your own content or another source, and puts them in the prompt so the model answers from them instead of from memory.
Re-ranking: A second pass over retrieved passages that reorders them by how well each one actually answers the question, often with a small, cheap model.
System prompt: Standing instructions sent with every request that set the model's role, rules and limits, such as which tools it may call and how often.

ServiceNow terms for AI people

ACL: Access control list. The rules that decide who can create, read, write or delete records in a table, and who can see or change each field.
Assignment rule: A rule that assigns a record to a group or person when the record meets fixed conditions. No model is involved.
Business rule: A server-side script that runs when a record is displayed, inserted, updated or deleted, or when a table is queried.
Change request: The record used to propose, approve and track a change to production, often shortened to CR.
CMDB: Configuration management database. The tables that record what IT runs, such as servers, applications and services, and how they depend on each other.
Configuration item: One record in the CMDB: a server, an application, a service or anything else IT manages. Usually shortened to CI.
Discovery: The ServiceNow application that scans the network and creates or updates configuration items in the CMDB automatically.
Flow Designer: ServiceNow's low-code tool for building automations from a trigger, actions and reusable subflows.
Knowledge base: The library of articles that agents and employees search for answers, often shortened to KB. AI answers are only as good as the articles behind them.
Now Assist: ServiceNow's generative AI features built into its products, such as incident summarization and knowledge article drafting.
Scoped app: An application with its own namespace on the instance. Its tables, scripts and roles are protected from other apps unless it grants access, and it moves between instances as one unit.
Service catalog: The menu of things employees can request, such as a new laptop or software access, each with its own form and fulfillment steps.
Subflow: A reusable sequence of Flow Designer actions with defined inputs and outputs, which flows and other subflows can call.
sys_id: The unique 32-character ID every ServiceNow record gets. Two records with the same name but different sys_ids are two different records.
System property: A named setting stored on the instance that scripts and flows read at run time, so behavior can change without a deployment.
Update set: A recorded bundle of configuration changes that moves from one instance to another, such as from development to production.