Core concepts and glossary

A plain-language guide to agents, tools, prompts, workflows, grants, knowledge, shadow mode, cases and OACP artifacts.

The simple mental model

An agent performs a defined job. It receives instructions and inputs, reads approved knowledge, and can request authorized tools. A workflow coordinates jobs. Policies, grants and approvals determine boundaries. Run history and audit evidence help you understand what actually happened.

1Task and context
A person or reviewed integration supplies the request and company context.
2Evidence and tools
The agent uses permitted knowledge and bounded tool access.
3Review and decision
A policy or person routes uncertain or consequential work.
4Recorded outcome
Inspect the result and authoritative downstream confirmation.

Glossary

Term	Plain-language meaning	Common misunderstanding
Agent / virtual employee	A configured AI task worker	Not a person or unlimited system administrator
Agent type	The role or implementation used by an agent	A type name alone does not identify an authorized stored agent
Prompt	Versioned instructions for a model	Instructions cannot create permissions
Tool	A callable operation on a system	Listing a tool does not grant its use
Connector	Integration configuration and provider access	Registration does not prove live readiness
Knowledge Base	Documents and extracted content for retrieval	Uploading a file does not train or fine-tune a model
OCR	Turning scanned images into text	Not guaranteed perfect recognition
Run	One execution attempt and its recorded result	A prepared answer is not an external transaction
Shadow	A candidate/evaluation state	Not proof that every side effect is automatically blocked
HITL	Human-in-the-loop review	A confidence percentage is not business authorization
Workflow	Reviewed steps, branches and handoffs	A schedule does not bypass an approval
Tenant	Your organization's isolation boundary	Not a company name in a prompt
Company context	The authorized business entity for a task	Not a way to cross tenant boundaries
Grant / scope	Bounded permission for an identity or tool	Not permission for unrelated financial decisions
Governed case	Evidence investigation, policy and human decision record	Separate from a generic agent run
Policy tier	Deterministic risk classification in a governed case	Not an LLM confidence score
Artifact	Source-linked, bounded evidence or capability metadata	Not transaction authority by itself
TTL / freshness	How long evidence may be reused and how current it is	A valid signature does not make old inventory current
OACP	Agentic commerce trust and interoperability work	Not a claim of adopted public standardization
MCP / A2A	Integration and discovery surfaces for agents/tools	Not automatic inclusion in every AI marketplace

Who owns what in commerce

AgenticOrg runs the buyer and seller agents. Grantex supplies trust, policy and canonical artifact authority. The merchant system remains the source of catalog, inventory and order truth. The provider, bank or fintech owns payment and mandate execution. POS or merchant systems confirm their own fulfillment outcomes.

A valid cached artifact can support non-binding conversation without sending every message through Grantex. An agent cannot use that cache to invent a price guarantee, inventory hold, successful payment or completed order. See Commerce.

Know the outcome vocabulary

Read the actual state: draft, prepared, queued, running, awaiting review, failed, refused or completed are not interchangeable. For integrations, require the provider/system-of-record confirmation before calling a business action successful. If you cannot explain the evidence behind a result to a colleague, pause and investigate rather than promoting it.

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