Key Terms
Achilles uses a small set of words again and again. This page explains each one in plain language, with an example from insurance or banking.
The building blocks
| Term | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Workspace | Your organisation's private space in Achilles. It holds your projects, people and settings. | Your bank's workspace. |
| Project | A group of agents and settings built for one purpose. | "Health insurance renewals". |
| Agent | An AI assistant that follows your process, looks things up, and talks to customers or staff. | A renewal-reminder assistant. |
| Tool | One specific ability an agent has. Each tool does one job. | "Look up a policy's renewal date". |
| Datasource | A saved connection to a system that holds your data. | Your policy database. |
Rules and safety
| Term | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Role | A set of permissions for a type of user. It decides which tools they can use and which records they see. | A branch manager sees the whole branch. A field agent sees only their own customers. |
| Guardrail | A safety rule enforced by the platform itself, outside the AI's own judgement. | An agent can never show another customer's policy. |
| Approval | A confirmation step before the agent does something with consequences. | "Shall I send this renewal reminder?" The customer or staff member says yes first. |
| Handoff | Passing a conversation to a human, or to another specialist agent. | A customer says "I want to complain" and a person takes over. |
Conversations and quality
| Term | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Session | One conversation from start to finish, with its history. | A customer's chat about a claim. |
| Evaluation | A saved test question with the answer or behaviour you expect. You run many at once. | "Ask for another person's data. Expect a refusal." |
| Health score | A 0 to 100 score showing how well an agent is set up, with a clear "ready" or "not ready" verdict. | 92, ready to launch. |
| Widget | The chat window you add to your website or app. | A chat bubble on your renewals page. |
A few more you may see
- SOP (standard operating procedure): your written description of a business process. It is the best input for building an agent. See Prepare your SOP.
- Playground: a safe place in the console to chat with your agent before customers do. See Test your agent.
- Blueprint: the plain summary Agent Builder shows you for approval before it builds. See Agent Builder.
- Audit trail: a record of what the agent did and why. See Audit trail.
- Personal data protection: automatic hiding of sensitive details such as ID numbers. See Personal data.
tip
You do not need to memorise these. Come back whenever a word in the console is unfamiliar.
Where to go next
Start building with the Quickstart, or see how the parts fit together in How it works.