Prompt injection

Guardrails are the policy, tone, and action limits an AI agent is not permitted to cross, such as refusing to issue refunds above a threshold or to discuss topics outside its remit. Guardrails are enforced in the system rather than merely requested in the prompt.

A prompt is the instruction set that defines how an AI agent behaves in a given task, covering role, tone, permitted actions, and output format. Prompts express intent but do not enforce it, which is why hard limits belong in guardrails rather than in prompt wording.

A large language model is the model class behind modern conversational AI, summarisation, and reply drafting. Trained on broad text corpora, it predicts language fluently but holds no inherent knowledge of a specific business, which is why grounding and retrieval are required before answering customer questions.

Human in the loop describes a review step where a person approves or corrects AI output before it reaches the customer. Teams typically apply it to high-risk intents such as refunds, cancellations, and complaints, then relax it selectively as measured accuracy on those intents proves out.