Glossary
Agentic AI refers to AI systems composed of agents that can behave and interact autonomously in order to achieve their objectives. These agents are small, specialised pieces of software that can make decisions and operate cooperatively or independently to achieve system objectives. Advances in agentic AI are driven by the integration of large language models (LLMs) with agent-based systems. By providing reasoning and discovery abilities, LLMs enhance an agent’s autonomy. This enables the agent to determine the most appropriate course of action to meet system objectives.16
Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to a broad range of algorithm-based technologies that solve complex tasks by carrying out functions that previously required human thinking. This processing falls within the scope of data protection law if personal information is used to train, test or deploy an AI system.
Automated decision-making (ADM) is the process of making a decision by automated means without any human involvement. Data protection law provides people with specific rights and protections if organisations are carrying out solely ADM that has legal or similarly significant effects on them. For example, automated decisions to award a financial loan or benefit or evaluations within recruitment tests.
Biometric technology refers to systems that use biometric data to recognise or identify a person’s identity. For example, facial recognition, fingerprint scanning and voice recognition systems.
Facial recognition technology (FRT) refers to the technologies that enable the automated recognition of people based on facial features extracted from digital facial images.
Foundation models are base models for AI systems that are trained on large amounts of data. They can generate outputs such as text, images and audio and be adapted to a range of tasks.
Generative AI refers to a type of AI that can generate outputs that resemble human-created content. Most of the current generative AI systems are based on the transformer architecture. This architecture is a type of deep learning model designed to process sequences of data, eg text, by focusing on the relationship between different parts of the input.
Large language models (LLMs) are a type of generative AI with the ability to produce human-like text, code and translations.
16 AI Insights:Agentic AI, Government Digital Service, 2025.