Glossary

Luxury + AI

The vocabulary used across The Augmented Maison, defined.

Luxury language

Maison: A Luxury business bearing a proper name, usually its founder's, with an identity constitutive of its value. To be distinguished from a 'brand' that may be disconnected from an embodied history. The word Maison is central to The Augmented Maison's vocabulary.
Comex: Executive Committee. The governing body of a Maison, typically composed of the President, CEO, and directors of the key functions (creative, commercial, financial, digital, image). The decision level at which strategic engagements are addressed.
Savoir-faire: The gestures, techniques, and craft-specific knowledge of a Maison. Often untransmissible outside long apprenticeship. Constitutive of perceived value.
Creative Direction: The creative function at the apex of a Maison, typically embodied by a name (a designer). Structures the visual identity, style, and aesthetic evolution of the Maison over the long term.
Brand sovereignty: A Maison's capacity to remain the primary source of its own story, against media, the resale market, and AI. Central concept in Sébastien Pagès's doctrine.

AI Visibility: A Maison's ability to be found, correctly represented and surfaced across generative AI and AI-powered search. It includes presence, accuracy, source authority and consistency.
AI-mediated discovery: Phenomenon by which clients discover brands, products, and Maisons via conversational AI (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) rather than via traditional search or media.
GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. Equivalent of SEO for conversational AI engines. Practice of optimising a brand's presence in AI-generated answers.
Share of AI: A Maison's share of voice in AI responses about its category. Proprietary AUGMA metric, analogue of traditional Share of Voice but computed across conversational ecosystems.
Hallucination: Factually incorrect statement produced by generative AI. Structural phenomenon, not fully eliminable, but measurable and reducible.
Source Authority Mapping: Hierarchised cartography of the sources AI engines cite when discussing a Maison. Used to identify dominant, faithful, and problematic sources.

AI Desirability: The degree to which AI understands and communicates the qualities that make a Maison distinctive, aspirational and worth recommending. It goes beyond mention or sentiment.
AI Narrative: The composite representation of a Maison created by AI systems from brand-owned and third-party sources.
AI Recommendation: The moment at which an AI system moves beyond description and actively proposes a Maison in response to a client need or context.
Cross-Model Consistency: Measure of a Maison's narrative unity across the different AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews).

Agentic Commerce: Commerce in which AI systems compare, select, recommend or act on behalf of a client.
Agent Readiness: The degree to which product information, services, permissions, governance and client experience support AI-mediated action without diluting brand standards.
Sovereign AI: An approach to AI that respects the sovereignty of user or Maison data and choices. Concept tied to The Sovereign Client, Sébastien's editorial series.

Brand Truth Profile: A repository of verifiable assertions about a Maison (typically 30 to 50), built with the Maison, used by AUGMA to detect hallucinations and compute the cross-model error rate.
Narrative Coherence Layer: AUGMA's strategic positioning. Software layer that ensures a Maison's narrative coherence across AI ecosystems. Layer 3 of the Unified Commerce stack (Layer 1: commerce operations; Layer 2: client intelligence; Layer 3: AI narrative coherence).

Unified Commerce: Strategic approach that considers physical commerce, e-commerce, clienteling, and AI presence as a unified system, not as separate channels. Underlying doctrine of Sébastien's advisory practice.
Clienteling: The practice of personalised client relationships in luxury, where a dedicated advisor knows each important client individually: their preferences, occasions, purchase cycle.
VIC: Very Important Client. A Maison's highest-value clients, typically managed in dedicated clienteling by a personal advisor. A small population (hundreds to a few thousand per Maison) but disproportionate contribution to revenue.