Business Acronyms: The Complete A–Z Glossary

277 acronyms across finance, marketing, startup, AI and tech — defined in plain English with examples and meeting context.

• 2FA — Two-Factor Authentication
• 9-box — 9-Box Talent Grid
• ABAC — Attribute-Based Access Control
• ABM — Account Based Marketing
• ACID — Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability
• ACV — Annual Contract Value
• AE — Account Executive
• Agent — AI Agent
• AGI — Artificial General Intelligence
• AI — Artificial Intelligence
• AIaaS — AI as a Service
• ANN — Artificial Neural Network
• AOV — Average Order Value
• API — Application Programming Interface
• ARPU — Average Revenue Per User
• ARR — Annual Recurring Revenue (advanced)
• ASR — Automatic Speech Recognition
• Attribution — Marketing Attribution
• AutoML — Automated Machine Learning
• B2B — Business to Business
• B2C — Business to Consumer
• BANT — Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline
• BASE — Basically Available, Soft state, Eventual consistency
• BATNA — Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement
• BR — Bounce Rate
• Burn Multiple — Burn Multiple
• Burn Rate — Monthly Cash Burn
• BYOC — Bring Your Own Cloud
• CAC — Customer Acquisition Cost
• CAC Payback — Customer Acquisition Cost Payback Period
• CAGR — Compound Annual Growth Rate
• CAP — Consistency, Availability, Partition tolerance
• Cap Table — Capitalization Table
• CapEx — Capital Expenditure
• CCC — Cash Conversion Cycle
• CCPA — California Consumer Privacy Act
• CDN — Content Delivery Network
• CEO — Chief Executive Officer
• CES — Customer Effort Score
• CFO — Chief Financial Officer
• CHRO — Chief Human Resources Officer
• Churn — Customer Churn Rate
• CI/CD — Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment
• CNN — Convolutional Neural Network
• COGS — Cost of Goods Sold
• Context Window — Context Window
• COO — Chief Operating Officer
• CoT — Chain of Thought
• CPA — Cost Per Acquisition
• CPC — Cost Per Click
• CPE — Cost Per Engagement
• CPL — Cost Per Lead
• CPM — Cost Per Mille (Thousand Impressions)
• CRM — Customer Relationship Management
• CRO — Conversion Rate Optimization
• CRR — Customer Retention Rate
• CSAT — Customer Satisfaction Score
• CTA — Call to Action
• CTO — Chief Technology Officer
• CTR — Click-Through Rate
• CV — Computer Vision
• CVR — Conversion Rate
• D&A — Depreciation & Amortization
• DAU — Daily Active Users
• dbt — Data Build Tool
• DCF — Discounted Cash Flow
• Dilution — Ownership Reduction
• DIO — Days Inventory Outstanding
• Distillation — Model Distillation
• DKIM — DomainKeys Identified Mail
• DMARC — Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance
• DMP — Data Management Platform
• DNS — Domain Name System
• DPO — Direct Preference Optimization
• DRY — Don't Repeat Yourself
• DSP — Demand-Side Platform
• DTC — Direct to Consumer
• EBITDA — Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization
• EC2 — Elastic Compute Cloud
• ELT — Extract, Load, Transform
• Embedding — Vector Embedding
• Embeddings — Vector Embeddings
• EPS — Earnings Per Share
• ERP — Enterprise Resource Planning
• ETL — Extract, Transform, Load
• EV/EBITDA — Enterprise Value to EBITDA
• EV/Revenue — Enterprise Value to Revenue
• EVA — Economic Value Added
• Eval — Model Evaluation
• FaaS — Function as a Service
• FCF — Free Cash Flow
• Fine-tuning — Model Fine-tuning
• FinOps — Cloud Financial Operations
• FOMO — Fear Of Missing Out
• FSL — Few-Shot Learning
• GAAP — Generally Accepted Accounting Principles
• GAN — Generative Adversarial Network
• GDPR — General Data Protection Regulation
• GM% — Gross Margin Percentage
• GMV — Gross Merchandise Value
• GPT — Generative Pre-trained Transformer
• GPU — Graphics Processing Unit
• GraphQL — Graph Query Language
• GRR — Gross Revenue Retention
• GTM — Go-To-Market
• Guardrails — AI Guardrails
• Hallucination — Model Hallucination
• HIPAA — Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
• HRBP — HR Business Partner
• HTTPS — Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure
• IaaS — Infrastructure as a Service
• IaC — Infrastructure as Code
• IAM — Identity and Access Management
• IC — Individual Contributor
• ICE — Impact, Confidence, Ease
• ICP — Ideal Customer Profile (deep dive)
• Inference — Model Inference
• IOI — Indication Of Interest
• IPaaS — Integration Platform as a Service
• IPO — Initial Public Offering
• IRR — Internal Rate of Return
• ISO 27001 — ISO/IEC 27001
• JSON — JavaScript Object Notation
• JTBD — Jobs To Be Done
• K-Factor — Viral Coefficient
• K8s — Kubernetes
• KISS — Keep It Simple, Stupid
• KOL — Key Opinion Leader
• KPI — Key Performance Indicator
• LAL — Lookalike Audience
• LBO — Leveraged Buyout
• LLM — Large Language Model
• LLMOps — Large Language Model Operations
• LOI — Letter of Intent
• LoRA — Low-Rank Adaptation
• LTV — Lifetime Value
• LTV:CAC — Lifetime Value to Acquisition Cost Ratio
• M&A — Mergers and Acquisitions
• Magic Number — SaaS Magic Number
• MAU — Monthly Active Users
• MBO — Management Buyout
• MCP — Model Context Protocol
• MEDDIC — Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion
• MER — Marketing Efficiency Ratio
• MFA — Multi-Factor Authentication
• ML — Machine Learning
• MLOps — Machine Learning Operations
• MNDA — Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement
• MoE — Mixture of Experts
• MoM — Month over Month
• MoSCoW — Must, Should, Could, Won't
• MQL — Marketing Qualified Lead
• MRQ — Most Recent Quarter
• MRR — Monthly Recurring Revenue
• MSA — Master Services Agreement
• Multimodal — Multimodal Model
• MVP — Minimum Viable Product
• NDA — Non-Disclosure Agreement
• NDR — Net Dollar Retention
• NLP — Natural Language Processing
• NOPAT — Net Operating Profit After Tax
• NPI — New Product Introduction
• NPS — Net Promoter Score
• NPV — Net Present Value
• NRR — Net Revenue Retention
• NSM — North Star Metric
• OAuth — Open Authorization
• OKR — Objectives and Key Results
• OLAP — Online Analytical Processing
• OLTP — Online Transaction Processing
• OpEx — Operating Expenditure
• ORM — Online Reputation Management
• OTE — On-Target Earnings
• P/E — Price-to-Earnings Ratio
• P&L — Profit and Loss
• PaaS — Platform as a Service
• PCI-DSS — Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard
• PE — Private Equity
• PESTLE — Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental
• PIK — Payment In Kind
• PIP — Performance Improvement Plan
• Pixel — Tracking Pixel
• PLG — Product-Led Growth
• PM — Product Manager
• PMF — Product-Market Fit
• PMO — Project Management Office
• PO — Product Owner
• POC — Proof of Concept
• PPC — Pay Per Click
• Pre-Seed — Pre-Seed Funding
• QA — Quality Assurance
• QBR — Quarterly Business Review
• QoQ — Quarter over Quarter
• Quantization — Model Quantization
• Quick Ratio — SaaS Quick Ratio
• RACI — Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed
• RAG — Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• RBAC — Role Based Access Control
• RDS — Relational Database Service
• REST — Representational State Transfer
• RevOps — Revenue Operations
• RFI — Request for Information
• RFP — Request for Proposal
• RICE — Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort
• RLHF — Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
• RNN — Recurrent Neural Network
• ROAS — Return on Ad Spend
• ROCE — Return On Capital Employed
• ROI — Return on Investment
• ROIC — Return On Invested Capital
• ROMI — Return On Marketing Investment
• RPO — Recovery Point Objective
• RTB — Real Time Bidding
• RTO — Recovery Time Objective
• Rule of 40 — Rule of 40
• Runway — Months of Survival
• S3 — Simple Storage Service
• SaaS — Software as a Service
• SaaS (deep) — Software as a Service (deep dive)
• SaaS LTV/CAC — Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio
• SAFE — Simple Agreement for Future Equity
• SAM — Serviceable Available Market
• SDK — Software Development Kit (deep)
• SDR — Sales Development Representative
• Seed — Seed Funding
• SEM — Search Engine Marketing
• SEO — Search Engine Optimization
• Series A — Series A Funding
• SFT — Supervised Fine-Tuning
• Skip-level — Skip-Level Meeting
• SKU — Stock Keeping Unit
• SLA — Service Level Agreement
• SLG — Sales-Led Growth
• SLO — Service Level Objective
• SMM — Social Media Marketing
• SMO — Social Media Optimization
• SOA — Service Oriented Architecture
• SOC 2 — System and Organization Controls 2
• SOLID — Single-responsibility, Open-closed, Liskov, Interface-segregation, Dependency-inversion
• SOM — Serviceable Obtainable Market
• SOP — Standard Operating Procedure
• SOTA — State of the Art
• SOV — Share Of Voice
• SOW — Statement of Work
• Span of Control — Span of Control
• SPF — Sender Policy Framework
• SPIFF — Sales Performance Incentive Fund
• SQL — Structured Query Language
• SRE — Site Reliability Engineering
• SSH — Secure Shell
• SSO — Single Sign-On
• SWOT — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats
• TAM — Total Addressable Market
• TCV — Total Contract Value
• TLS — Transport Layer Security
• Token — Token
• TPU — Tensor Processing Unit
• TTS — Text-to-Speech
• TTV — Time To Value
• UGC — User Generated Content
• UI — User Interface
• USP — Unique Selling Proposition
• UTM — Urchin Tracking Module
• UX — User Experience
• VC — Venture Capital
• Vector DB — Vector Database
• VM — Virtual Machine
• VPC — Virtual Private Cloud
• VPN — Virtual Private Network
• VRAM — Video Random Access Memory
• WACC — Weighted Average Cost of Capital
• WCAG — Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• WIP — Work In Progress
• YAGNI — You Aren't Gonna Need It
• YoY — Year over Year
• Zero Trust — Zero Trust Architecture
• ZSL — Zero-Shot Learning