LLM
An LLM is the engine behind tools like ChatGPT and Claude: a model trained on vast amounts of text that predicts language well enough to draft, summarise, translate, answer and reason. It's the general-purpose part every AI build starts from.
Why it matters
For the first time, software can competently handle open-ended text: the medium most business work happens in. That makes automatable a whole class of tasks (drafting, triage, summarising, extracting) that were previously "hire someone" problems.
How it works
Trained to predict the next word across enormous text corpora, the model absorbs patterns of language, knowledge and reasoning. At use time it generates responses to your input. Two habits matter: it answers from patterns, not lookup (so it can be confidently wrong) and it only knows your business if you supply that context.
What to do about it
Judge LLMs by task fit, not hype: they excel where output is text, a human reviews it, and being 90% right saves real time. Start there, not with the mission-critical stuff.
