Glossary

Luxury + AI

The vocabulary used across The Augmented Maison, defined.

Luxury terms

Maison: A luxury house bearing a proper name, with identity constitutive of 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.
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.
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.
Clienteling: The practice of personalised client relationships in luxury, where a dedicated advisor knows each important client individually — their preferences, occasions, purchase cycle.
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.

Conversational AI terms

Agentic commerce: Commerce mediated by AI agents acting on behalf of the client (booking, purchasing, comparing). Marks the shift from client-driven commerce (who clicks) to agent-driven commerce (who executes).
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.
Hallucination: Factually incorrect statement produced by generative AI. Structural phenomenon, not fully eliminable, but measurable and reducible.
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.
Cross-Model Consistency: Measure of a Maison's narrative unity across the different AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews).
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.
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.
Source Authority Mapping: Hierarchised cartography of the sources AI engines cite when discussing a Maison. Used to identify dominant, faithful, and problematic sources.
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.