Glossary
The language of governed agents.
Plain-language definitions of the terms we use across the site — the vocabulary of building, running and governing AI agents in a regulated enterprise.
Agentification
- Agentification
- The discipline of turning a real business process into AI agents that are built, run and governed in production — not a one-off pilot. For regulated enterprises it spans strategy, engineering, governance and enablement, ending with the client owning the agents.
- Competence center
- A team that concentrates the scarce expertise to build, run and govern agents across an organization, and transfers that capability to the client — as opposed to a one-project consultancy or an off-the-shelf tool.
- The Foundation
- Vesster's six-to-eight-week engagement that takes one high-consequence process to a governed agent in production, measured against an auditable baseline and ending at a go/no-go gate — weeks to a real answer, not a year.
- Forward-deployed team
- Senior specialists embedded in the client's operation, working on the client's real processes and systems to build the agent-ready context and the agents themselves, then transferring ownership.
Governance
- VessterOS
- Vesster's operating system for agents: it orchestrates teams of agents and enforces governance — graduated autonomy, compliance-as-code, audit trails, identity and a kill-switch — built for probabilistic agents rather than traditional IT change control.
- Graduated autonomy (L0–L4)
- An autonomy ladder an agent climbs only by passing evals: L0/L1 observe (shadow), L2 acts human-in-the-loop, L3 runs human-on-the-loop, L4 is fully autonomous. Autonomy is earned per capability, not switched on.
- REQUIRE-HUMAN
- A wired compliance verdict: where the law or a risk committee requires a person to decide, the agent is structurally prevented from deciding and must hand off. It is enforced, not a guideline. The agent prepares the decision; the human makes it.
- Audit trail (hash-chained)
- An append-only, tamper-evident log written before an action commits, where each entry is chained to the previous one by a cryptographic hash. It gives a regulator inspectable evidence for every autonomous decision.
- Eval harness
- The automated test suite that measures an agent against an auditable baseline before it earns more autonomy and continuously thereafter — the trust threshold that gates promotion up the autonomy ladder.
- Drift monitoring
- Ongoing measurement that detects when an agent's behavior degrades or shifts — often after a model update — so it can be caught, rolled back or re-gated before it causes harm.
- Kill-switch
- A tested, logged control to immediately stop an agent or revoke its autonomy. Being tested and logged is what makes it defensible to a regulator, not just a feature that theoretically exists.
Security
- Non-human identity
- A distinct, governed identity issued to each agent (rather than reusing a person's credentials), with least-privilege permissions, so an agent's actions are attributable and its access is scoped and revocable.
- Taint boundary
- A structural control that keeps untrusted input (documents, web content, tool output) from ever becoming executable privilege — containing prompt injection by design rather than trying to detect every malicious string.
- Prompt injection
- An attack where malicious instructions hidden in data an agent reads try to hijack its behavior. It is the agentic-AI equivalent of injection attacks and a core threat in the OWASP Agentic Security Initiative.
Compliance
- Compliance-as-code
- Expressing regulatory and policy rules as executable checks the agent must pass at runtime, producing machine-readable verdicts (ALLOW, ALLOW-WITH-CONDITIONS, DENY, REQUIRE-HUMAN) instead of a static policy document.
- EU AI Act (high-risk)
- The EU regulation classifying certain AI uses as high-risk (e.g. credit, insurance, essential services), with obligations for risk management, data governance, human oversight, transparency and logging. Vesster's governance is designed to meet these obligations.
- DORA
- The EU Digital Operational Resilience Act, which sets ICT risk-management, testing and third-party-oversight requirements for financial entities. Agentic systems in banking and insurance must fit within a DORA-aligned operating model.
- ISO/IEC 42001
- The international management-system standard for artificial intelligence (AI management systems). Vesster is ISO/IEC 42001 by design, alongside its ISO/IEC 27001, 27017 and 27018 certifications for information security.
Deployment
- Provider-agnostic / deploy-anywhere
- An architecture not tied to one model vendor or cloud: frontier or open-source models, running in your VPC, on-premises or air-gapped, with sensitivity-based routing so regulated data stays in your perimeter and you avoid lock-in.
- Confidential computing / TEE
- Hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs) that keep data encrypted even while it is being processed, used where the most sensitive regulated workloads must run without exposing data to the host.
