Glossary

What is an AI assistant?

An AI assistant is an app that helps a person with everyday tasks through conversation, such as writing, summarising, answering questions and working through files. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot are the best-known examples, and many business tools now include one. Each is built on an AI language model, with chat history, file uploads, memory and connections to other apps added around it.

Why it matters for a business

An assistant works with a person turn by turn: it answers, and the person decides what happens next. That keeps a human judgement on every step, which makes assistants the cheapest way for a team to learn what AI does with the team’s own work. An agent goes further and takes several actions on its own. The business plans of the major assistants differ from the personal ones in what matters most to a company: a contract, training switched off by default, and admin controls, priced per person per month.