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Glossary

Generative AI

Generative AI is AI that produces new content — text, code, images — in response to a prompt. It answers, drafts, or summarizes; a person then reviews and acts on the output.


The contrast with agentic AI is action: generative AI produces content, agentic AI pursues a goal and takes steps to complete a task. Most agents use a generative model as their reasoning engine.

Because a human reviews generative output before it is used, its governance is lighter than an agent's — you review the answer, rather than having to govern an action.

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