Artifact
- Industry term
An artifact is a produced output with a name and a place, such as a file, report, dataset, image, or record, so a person or a later step can find, check, and use it.
A chat reply can be edited or regenerated, so two people may quote different versions, and usually only whoever had the chat can find it again. A saved file sits where people and programs can open it. When each month's file uses the same columns, a spreadsheet can set this month's numbers beside last month's.
Where you’ll meet it
In a team meeting, your manager asks for the summary of customer complaints your AI assistant wrote three weeks ago. It was a reply in one of your chats. You scroll through dozens of conversations while everyone waits, unsure the version you find is the one you sent around.
What to do
Once you find it, copy the summary into a document in the team's shared folder, with its date in the file name. When you ask for next month's summary, paste in this one's headings so the two line up, and save the new file beside the old one.
Easy to mix up
| Artifact | Output destination |
|---|---|
| The saved result itself, such as the summary file | The place results land, such as a shared folder |
Check yourself
A March decision memo cites figures from the team's planning spreadsheet, which several people edit every week. In September, an auditor asks to see the numbers the memo relied on. Where do you find them?
Go deeperChat products borrowed a word that software teams use strictly
In software, a build artifact is a file a build produces, such as a packaged app. Teams store each one with a version number and release that exact file, so users get the same file that passed the tests. A rebuild at release time could pull in changed outside code and come out slightly different.
Some AI chat products give the name "artifact" to a document or small app shown in a panel beside the conversation. Until it is downloaded or shared by link, only that chat can open it, so in the general sense it has a name and no place others can reach.