Duet Field Guide
Clear, practical definitions for the AI, marketing, revenue, and measurement concepts shaping modern go-to-market teams—written for CEOs, CMOs, CROs, and GTM operators.
Understand the language. See why it matters. Put the ideas to work.
AI & Agentic Work
Agentic AI describes systems that can plan and take actions toward a goal with some degree of autonomy. An agentic system may break work into steps, select tools, observe results, adapt its plan, and involve a person when confidence, permissions, or business risk require human judgment.
AI & Agentic Work
An AI agent is a software system that can pursue a goal by interpreting context, choosing actions, using tools, and evaluating intermediate results. Unlike a basic chatbot response, an agent may complete multiple steps across applications, ask for missing information, or escalate when it reaches a limit.
Expertise & Human–AI Work
An AI Digital Twin is a software representation of a person, role, process, or operating system designed to reproduce selected patterns of knowledge, judgment, or behavior. In knowledge work, a twin should be bounded to documented expertise and validated use cases—not presented as a perfect copy of a human being.
Expertise & Human–AI Work
An AI-native marketing team is designed around shared intelligence, automated workflows, and human judgment from the beginning rather than adding isolated AI tools to a traditional operating model. Roles, processes, metrics, and governance are reorganized around outcomes and the best division of work between people and machines.
Search & Answer Visibility
Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is the practice of making accurate, useful content easy for search engines and AI answer systems to discover, understand, cite, and present in response to questions. It emphasizes direct answers, clear entities and relationships, strong evidence, technical accessibility, and recognizable source authority.
Brand, Buyers & Demand
Brand Humanity is the practice of building brands around the qualities that make people and organizations meaningfully human—such as authenticity, empathy, emotion, purpose, creativity, presence, and belonging. It treats brand as the cumulative experience a company creates through leadership, culture, products, communication, and customer interactions.
Company Intelligence
A continuous learning system uses new evidence, feedback, decisions, and outcomes to improve the context or guidance available for future work. In business settings, this often combines automated signal collection with human review, version control, and explicit rules for approving changes.
Revenue Economics
Customer acquisition cost, or CAC, is the average sales and marketing cost required to acquire a new customer during a defined period. A fully loaded CAC may include media, programs, salaries, commissions, agencies, tools, and allocated overhead; companies should state exactly which costs and customers are included.
Search & Answer Visibility
Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is an industry term for improving the likelihood that content is discovered, understood, and referenced by generative AI search and answer experiences. The durable practices largely overlap with strong SEO: accessible pages, original value, clear structure, reliable evidence, and trusted entities.
GTM Strategy
A go-to-market strategy is the integrated plan for how a company will reach, win, serve, and grow customers in a defined market. It connects target customers, category and positioning, product value, routes to market, sales and marketing motions, customer experience, economics, capabilities, and measures of success.
Expertise & Human–AI Work
Human in the loop, or HITL, is a workflow design in which a person contributes judgment, approval, correction, or craft at a defined point in an AI-enabled process. The human is part of how the work is completed, especially when context is ambiguous, stakes are high, or quality is difficult to evaluate automatically.
GTM Strategy
An ideal customer profile, or ICP, describes the type of account most likely to realize significant value from a company’s offering and become a valuable customer in return. It combines firmographic or demographic traits with needs, triggers, constraints, buying conditions, expected value, and evidence from successful customers.
Revenue Economics
The LTV-to-CAC ratio compares estimated customer lifetime value with the cost to acquire that customer. It is a directional unit-economics measure, not a universal grade: acceptable ratios vary with growth stage, capital strategy, margins, retention, payback, and the reliability of the underlying assumptions.
Pipeline & Measurement
Marketing attribution is the practice of assigning credit for a conversion or revenue outcome to marketing touchpoints. Attribution models may emphasize the first touch, last touch, multiple touches, or algorithmic weights. They describe observed paths under chosen rules; they do not automatically prove causal impact.
Company Intelligence
A Marketing Brain is a living intelligence layer that captures a company’s strategy, brand, customers, market knowledge, decisions, and performance signals so people and AI can work from shared context. Unlike a folder of documents, it is designed to stay current, retrieve the right knowledge, and improve future marketing work.
Revenue Economics
Operating leverage is the degree to which revenue or output can grow faster than operating costs. In a GTM context, it can come from reusable knowledge, automation, better processes, higher employee capacity, consolidated vendors, and technology that increases throughput without a proportional increase in fixed headcount.
Pipeline & Measurement
Pipeline velocity estimates how quickly qualified opportunities generate revenue. A common formula combines the number of opportunities, average deal value, win rate, and sales cycle length. The metric is best used directionally because stage definitions, cohort timing, and deal concentration can distort the result.
GTM Strategy
Positioning is the deliberate context a company creates so a specific audience understands what an offering is, who it is for, what valuable problem it solves, how it differs from alternatives, and why those differences matter. Positioning is a strategic choice; messaging is how that choice is expressed.
AI & Agentic Work
Retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, is a method that finds relevant information from selected sources and supplies it to an AI model when generating an answer. The model can then respond using current, company-specific, or domain-specific evidence that was not fully contained in its original training data.
Pipeline & Measurement
Return on marketing investment, or ROMI, estimates the financial return generated by marketing relative to the marketing investment required. Strong versions use incremental contribution or profit rather than attributed revenue alone and include the relevant media, people, tools, agencies, and program costs.
Search & Answer Visibility
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of improving a website’s technical accessibility, content usefulness, relevance, authority, and user experience so it can be discovered and selected in organic search. Modern SEO includes classic search results as well as search experiences that synthesize answers with AI.
Brand, Buyers & Demand
Signal-based GTM is an operating approach that uses meaningful changes in buyer, account, customer, product, or market behavior to determine when and how the company should act. Signals can trigger research, prioritization, content, outreach, expansion plays, or updates to strategy.
Company Intelligence
A system of intelligence turns an organization’s data, knowledge, rules, and feedback into context-aware recommendations and actions. It sits above systems of record, which store transactions, and systems of engagement, which manage interactions, to help the business interpret information and decide what to do next.
Brand, Buyers & Demand
Thought leadership is a credible, distinctive body of ideas that helps an audience understand an important problem or make better decisions. It is not simply frequent content or executive visibility; it requires original perspective, relevant expertise, evidence, and sustained contribution to a market conversation.
AI has made generation fast and abundant. The harder advantage is turning company context, expert judgment, coordinated execution, and market feedback into better outcomes. This glossary explains both the foundational business metrics leaders already use and the emerging systems changing how modern teams work.
Each entry begins with a neutral, answer-first definition. It then explains the executive implication, offers a practical way to apply or measure the concept, and clearly separates Duet’s point of view. The goal is useful understanding—not product language disguised as a dictionary.
From language to leverage
Bring your company’s context, expert Digital Twins, AI agents, and human operators into one workspace that takes marketing from idea to outcome.