Grounding (AI)
Grounding is the practice of tying an AI system's outputs to a specific, trusted source of truth — your own documents, data, and rules — so its answers reflect your business rather than generic internet knowledge. A grounded AI cites and works from your sources; an ungrounded one guesses.
Key characteristics
- Answers are derived from your documents/data, not general training
- Reduces hallucination — the AI works from real sources
- Lets outputs reflect your products, policies, and procedures
- Often paired with citations so claims are checkable
- The difference between a plausible answer and a correct one
Example
A loan officer grounds an AI teammate in their file-requirements checklist. When a borrower's package arrives, the teammate checks it against those exact requirements — flagging the missing bank statement — instead of guessing what a generic loan needs.
How it relates to Kuvai
Grounding is the core of how a Kuvai teammate works: you point it at your documents, policies, and data, and it does its job against your knowledge rather than the open internet. That's why a Kuvai teammate's output reflects how your business actually operates — and why it can show its work. It drafts from your sources; you decide.
Related terms
An AI teammate is a software colleague that owns a defined job end-to-end — grounded in a business's own documents and data, connected to its tools, and running on a schedule. Unlike an AI assistant you prompt, a teammate works continuously, accumulates your context, and drafts actions for your approval rather than waiting to be asked.
AI agentAn AI agent is software that perceives its environment, decides what to do, and takes action toward a goal — often autonomously and over multiple steps — by using tools, calling APIs, and reasoning with a language model. Unlike a chatbot that only generates text in reply to a prompt, an agent can act on the world: it can search, read, write to systems, and chain steps together to complete a task rather than just answer a question.
Agentic AIAgentic AI is artificial intelligence that plans and takes multi-step, autonomous action toward a goal — rather than just generating a single piece of text in response to a prompt. Where a standard generative model answers what you ask, agentic AI decides what needs to happen, breaks the goal into steps, uses tools to carry them out, and adapts as it goes, working with limited human input.