I nodded along in a meeting about AI strategy for an hour and understood maybe 20% of it, where do I actually start?

I am a operations manager at a logistics company. We had a two hour meeting last week with an external AI consultancy. They talked about large language models, embeddings, inference costs, fine-tuning, retrieval augmented generation. I wrote the words down. I did not know what most of them meant and I was too embarrassed to ask because everyone else in the room seemed to be following along fine.

Afterwards I asked a colleague to explain and he looked at me like I had asked him to explain electricity. Apparently this is all just assumed knowledge now.

I am not trying to become a technical expert. I just need to understand enough to participate meaningfully in these conversations and evaluate what vendors are actually telling us. What is the minimum viable understanding someone in a business role actually needs, and what is the fastest honest path to getting there?