The AEBOK Glossary: the vocabulary of governed AI decisions

New disciplines earn their names one term at a time. This page holds the working vocabulary of AEBOK, the Autonomous Enterprise Body of Knowledge, in plain language, with each term defined the way the standard uses it.

First, the ladder: five words people use interchangeably, and should not

Settings, controls, policies, boundaries, authority. Most AI governance conversations blur them, and every incident in the news lives in the gaps between them. Each rung adds exactly one thing the rung below lacks.

Setting. What a system is configured to do. A setting exists, and that is all it does. Nobody necessarily decided it.

Control. Machinery that enforces a limit. A control can block, log, and stop. It cannot tell you whether anyone decided the limit it enforces.

Policy. A rule the business actually decided, in writing. A policy without a control is documentation. A control without a policy is exposure.

Boundary. A policy applied to one specific system's decisions: what it may decide, what it may never decide, and where it must stop. One page per system is enough.

Authority. AEBOK defines authority over an AI decision as a written boundary, owned by a named person who answers for the outcome, with a review date. A configuration can enforce authority. It can never replace it.

The ten terms

Commit point. AEBOK defines a commit point as the precise moment in a workflow where a system's analysis becomes an action the business must answer for. The system approves, issues, denies, routes, or releases. Not to be confused with the decision's difficulty; a trivial decision at scale is still a commit point.

Commit surface. The full set of commit points a system touches. Four patterns cover most enterprises: the agent that acts, the recommender that influences, the copilot that drafts, and the chatbot that states. Each pattern commits differently, and each needs its own boundary.

Decision rights. The documented answer to who may make a given decision, human or system, within what limits. Decision rights existed long before AI; AEBOK extends the discipline to software that decides.

Decision lineage. The record of why an action was allowed: what the system looked at, which rule it applied, and whose authority let it apply that rule. An audit log shows that an action happened. Decision lineage shows why the organization allowed it.

Autonomy mode. The level of independence assigned to one decision, from human-decides through human-monitors to system-decides-within-boundary. AEBOK assigns mode per commit point, never per company; there is no such thing as a Level 3 organization.

Stop lines. The conditions that force a system to halt and hand work to a human, no matter how confident it is. Real stop lines come in three kinds: a dollar amount, a situation the playbook was not written for, and the system's own uncertainty.

The catch. What happens after a stop: the named person who receives the handed-back case, the clock they answer on, and the actual power to decide rather than route. A handoff nobody catches is a dropped ball with better paperwork.

The Eight Questions. AEBOK's core diagnostic for any deciding system: what may it decide, what information may it use, where must it stop, who owns it, what happens when it stops, what gets written down, who can switch it off, and when do we look at this again.

The Commit Path. The flagship AEBOK method: locate every commit point in a workflow, assess each for risk, reversibility, policy clarity, data quality and accountability, then assign autonomy mode and write the boundary. Feasibility alone never decides.

The autonomous enterprise. The destination, not a technology: an organization that has deliberately decided which decisions its systems may make, written those decisions down, and staffed the accountability. AEBOK holds that you do not buy your way there. You govern your way there.

The vocabulary above is maintained as part of the AEBOK standard. Terms evolve as the standard does; the date at the top reflects the last revision. For the full orientation, get the AEBOK Guide.