Strategic framework
What is the difference between AI Visibility and AI Desirability?
AI Visibility asks whether a Maison appears accurately and authoritatively in AI-mediated discovery. AI Desirability asks whether the qualities that create preference, heritage, savoir-faire, exclusivity, cultural relevance and narrative authority, are understood and translated into recommendation. A Maison can score strongly on one and weakly on the other.
What is Agentic Commerce?
Agentic Commerce describes commerce in which AI systems move beyond answering questions to comparing, selecting or acting on behalf of the client. For Luxury, this creates new questions around brand expression, permissions, product truth, clienteling, service and governance.
Advisory engagements
What kinds of engagements does Sébastien take on?
Three formats. The AI Narrative Audit: a three-week reading of how conversational AI describes, recommends or distorts the Maison, delivered as a report built for the Executive Committee, a readout and a prioritised 90-day roadmap. The 18-Dimension Strategic Diagnostic: a six-to-eight-week assessment of the digital and AI operating model across commerce, data, organisation, clienteling, brand sovereignty and agentic readiness. Ongoing advisory: senior support for leadership teams steering digital, AI and unified-commerce transformation over time, including major strategic choices such as new market entry, repositioning or structural technology decisions.
How do The Augmented Maison and AUGMA work together?
The Augmented Maison provides strategic diagnosis and advisory. AUGMA provides the measurement and intelligence layer. They can be used independently or together, depending on the Maison's needs.
What is Sébastien's availability?
Sébastien takes on a limited number of simultaneous engagements to preserve the quality of his personal involvement. New engagements typically follow a quarterly pipeline. For Maisons looking to engage in the next 90 days, early contact is recommended.
AUGMA
How does AUGMA compare to horizontal AI-visibility platforms?
Horizontal platforms are calibrated for mainstream tech and retail brands: their vocabulary, prompts and indicators are not adapted to the codes of Maisons. AUGMA makes a different choice, sectoral depth. It is calibrated prompt by prompt across eight luxury verticals, built with the vocabulary of Maisons (manufacture, atelier, savoir-faire, exclusivité) and structured for luxury Executive Committees rather than retail CMOs. This specialisation rests on sixteen years of operating experience inside the Maisons.
How long until you see results with AUGMA?
First signals appear from week one: current position, principal hallucinations, dominant authority sources. The full benefit arrives at six to twelve weeks, the time it takes for corrective actions (content updates, hallucination fixes, editorial adjustments) to begin propagating through the AI models. The durable benefit builds over six to twelve months, the time required for AI models to integrate the corrections and for the Maison to reclaim sovereignty over its narrative.
Which Maisons is AUGMA relevant for?
Any Maison whose AI perception has strategic value, with a structured digital team and an Executive Committee that wants to read its AI presence over time. The entry plan and the seven-day trial let a Maison judge the reading on its own case before committing.
Methodology and data
How is the AI Desirability Index produced?
Each edition applies the same method to ten Maisons of one category: five AI models are queried, 2,400 responses are evaluated, and six dimensions are scored from 0 to 100 on two axes, AI Presence and Cultural Desirability, then averaged across models. Every figure is traceable to its source response, and each edition publishes its full methodology and research period. Accuracy audits are kept separate from desirability scoring.
What does AUGMA measure, concretely?
Share of AI, hallucination rate against a Brand Truth Profile built with the Maison, cross-model consistency, AI-powered search coverage, source authority, narrative shifts, competitive movement and anomalies. Monitoring runs weekly across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, depending on the plan.
Confidentiality and international work
Does Sébastien sign NDAs?
Yes, by default. Every advisory engagement starts with a standard NDA. AUGMA hosts client data in the EU and never routes it through public AI models; the Brand Truth Profile remains the property of the Maison. Enterprise engagements add dedicated confidentiality clauses.
Does Sébastien work outside France?
Yes. Sébastien operates in French and English, in Paris, London, Milan, New York, and occasionally Asia. International engagements are structured case by case. The firm is based in Paris (47 rue Vivienne, 75002).
Starting a conversation
How does a first contact work?
Three ways in. For Maisons that want to experiment with AUGMA autonomously: the seven-day trial on app.augma-ai.com, without commitment. For Maisons that want a direct conversation: the contact form, or an email to sebastien@theaugmentedmaison.com; Sébastien answers personally to qualify the need and propose a first 30-minute exchange. For Executive Committees looking for a deep strategic dialogue: a direct meeting with Sébastien, typically in Paris, occasionally by video for first exchanges.
The terms used here are defined in the glossary; the framework is detailed on the Framework page.