Glossary
Glossary
The book's operational vocabulary at your fingertips.
- AI Act
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European Regulation 2024/1689 on artificial intelligence. Classifies HR uses (recruitment, evaluation, management) as high-risk systems, requiring governance and traceability.
See chapter 14 - ATS
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Applicant Tracking System. Recruitment software that has become the first point of contact between an applicant and an employer, and a privileged terrain for algorithmic bias.
See chapter 13 - Cobbler with no shoes
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The paradox by which the HR function, supposed to orchestrate the transformation of others, is statistically the least equipped with AI tools within its own scope.
See chapter 5 - Contagion coefficient
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Potential Stack indicator measuring an employee's ability to spread a skill or behaviour to their immediate surroundings. Central to any mass-upskilling strategy.
See chapter 4 - Fortress
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First posture in the AI deployment triptych: locked perimeter, mastered use cases, restrictive governance, controlled adoption. Chosen for processes carrying high regulatory risk.
See chapter 8 - Front Line
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Second posture: the contact zone between AI and day-to-day operations, where validated use cases are industrialised at field-team scale. The posture of replicable productivity gain.
See chapter 8 - Hallucination
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Production by an LLM of a plausible but false statement, with no uncertainty signal. A central operational risk for any HR use not framed by a RAG architecture.
See chapter 13 - HR copilot
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A conversational assistant embedded in HR processes (recruitment, management, learning) designed to augment the practitioner's productivity without replacing human decision-making.
See chapter 9 - HR doctrine
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A coherent set of principles, postures and trade-offs that structures HR decision-making in the face of AI. Distinct from a strategy: it precedes the tools.
See chapter 7 - HRIS
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Human Resources Information System. An integrated platform handling administration, payroll, talent and HR reporting. The indispensable foundation for any AI orchestration in HR.
See chapter 11 - Human latency
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The gap between the arrival of a new business requirement and the team's average ability to meet it fluently. A cost rarely accounted for, yet decisive in AI ROI.
See chapter 1 - Laboratory
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Third posture: a failure-tolerant experimentation space dedicated to exploring emerging use cases and accelerating HR team upskilling on AI.
See chapter 8 - LLM
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Large Language Model. A deep-learning model trained on vast text corpora, able to generate and reason in natural language. The foundational layer of HR copilots.
See chapter 9 - Operational framework
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A directly applicable model, delivered with its calculation tools, steering templates and decision criteria. Different from a concept: it instantiates inside a calendar.
See chapter 7 - Pay-for-Agility
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A bonus model that compensates the speed of acquiring new skills rather than the stock held. Designed to align compensation with business need without breaking existing pay structures.
See chapter 12 - People Analytics
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The quantitative-analysis discipline applied to HR data. Its maturity conditions an organisation's ability to measure Time-to-Skill, contagion and latency.
See chapter 11 - Potential Stack
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A reading framework that stacks six observable layers of human potential (learning capacity, absorption speed, contextual plasticity, appetite, execution reliability, contagion) to qualify an employee beyond their skills list.
See chapter 4 - RAG
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Retrieval-Augmented Generation. An architecture pairing an LLM with a vectorised document base to ground answers in the company's corpus and limit hallucinations.
See chapter 9 - Reskilling
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Conversion toward a different job, partial or total, typically employer-initiated. A key measure of Time-to-Skill and a preferred lever against accelerated obsolescence.
See chapter 6 - Skill graph
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A network representation of an organisation's skills, their adjacencies and their trajectories. A technical building block used by modern HRIS and AI-enabled ATS systems.
See chapter 11 - Skills Ontology
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A structured catalogue of an organisation's skills, normalised to enable machine inference. Its quality conditions the relevance of any internal mobility tool.
See chapter 11 - Time-to-Skill
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Average duration, expressed in days or weeks, required for an employee to reach target productivity on a new work gesture. A budget metric that becomes the pivot of AI-HR planning.
See chapter 6 - Trajectory Radar
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A mapping tool that anticipates an employee's likely internal moves over eighteen to thirty-six months by crossing the Potential Stack with weak signals and market tension.
See chapter 10 - Upskilling
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Raising an employee's mastery level within a job they already perform. To be distinguished from reskilling, which repositions them on a different job.
See chapter 6 - Workforce Planning
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The strategic workforce-planning discipline, crossing business scenarios, internal demographics and market tension. Reinvented by the arrival of generative models.
See chapter 10