Expert Claude by Anthropic

AI glossary

The AI terms that matter,
in plain English.

A concise reference from Ashford & Sterling, an AI agency and AI consultancy specialised in Claude by Anthropic. Clear, one-sentence definitions of the concepts we use every day with our clients — from AI agents and MCP to RAG, GEO and sovereign AI.

Home › AI Glossary

AI agent
An AI agent is a system that takes a goal in natural language and autonomously plans and carries out the steps to reach it, using tools and data.
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that connects an AI model such as Claude to your internal systems, data and tools in a controlled way.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
RAG grounds an AI model's answers in your own documents, retrieving the relevant passages at query time so responses are accurate and sourced.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
GEO is the practice of optimising an organisation's content so that AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini cite and recommend it.
Context engineering
Context engineering is the discipline of designing and maintaining the structured context an AI agent needs to produce reliable, high-quality results.
Claude Code
Claude Code is Anthropic's agentic coding tool that helps engineering teams write, review, debug and ship software directly from natural-language instructions.
Claude Cowork
Claude Cowork is Anthropic's collaborative workspace that lets business teams produce, analyse and decide with Claude inside their everyday tools.
Agent Skills
Agent Skills are reusable capabilities that specialise a Claude agent on a specific business process.
n8n automation
n8n automation orchestrates business workflows across your tools, calling an AI model such as Claude for the intelligent steps.
Large Language Model (LLM)
A large language model is an AI system trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate natural language; Claude, GPT and Gemini are examples.
Sovereign AI
Sovereign AI keeps models, data and processing under a jurisdiction's control to meet residency, security and regulatory requirements.
AI Perception Audit™
An AI Perception Audit measures what AI platforms say about an organisation across scenarios and platforms, producing a score and a prioritised action plan.

Put these into practice

From definitions
to production.

Ashford & Sterling advises, trains and implements Claude by Anthropic for enterprise — agents, MCP, RAG and automation, deployed into production alongside your teams.