How do you explain what you do to non-technical stakeholders

"So its like chatgpt but for our company?"

Sure man. Yeah. Lets go with that.

Tried explaining rag to my cfo last week and I could physically see the moment I lost him. Started with "retrieval augmented generation" which was mistake one. Pivoted to "it looks stuff up before answering" and he goes "so like google?" and at that point I just said yes because what else am I supposed to do.

The thing is I dont even fully understand half the dashboards I set up. Latency p99, token usage, embedding drift. I know what the words mean. I dont always know what to actually do when the numbers change. But it sounds good in meetings so here we are.

Lately I just screenshare the workflow diagram when people ask questions. Boxes and arrows. This thing connects to that thing. Nobody asks followup questions because it looks technical enough that they feel like they got an answer. Works way better than me saying "orchestration layer" and watching everyone nod politely.