Glossary

What is grounding in AI?

Grounding means giving an AI model trusted source material, such as a document or a database record, and having it base its answer on that material. Without grounding, a model answers from what it learned in training, which can be out of date, incomplete or wrong. Pasting a contract into a chat and asking about it is grounding by hand. Systems that search company documents automatically, known as RAG, do it at scale.

Why it matters for a business

Grounding is the main defence against hallucination on questions of fact. It changes the failure from inventing a fact out of nothing to misreading something that exists, which is smaller and far easier to check. It also moves the weak point: when a grounded system is wrong, the usual cause is that the wrong passage came back. A citation shows which passage an answer used. It does not show that the right passage was found.