THE LAB GLOSSARY

The vocabulary of AI Commerce

20 concepts that define modern digital commerce — from MACH architecture to agents that buy on their own. Technical definitions, no marketing, with real lab examples.

AI applied to commerce10

AI Commerce

AI Commerce is the application of artificial intelligence — predictive models, LLMs, autonomous agents — to digital commerce operations: product discovery, search, personalization,…

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LLM

An LLM (Large Language Model) is an artificial intelligence model trained on enormous volumes of text to predict and generate language coherently.

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RAG

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is a technique that combines a language model (LLM) with an external information retrieval system, generally a vector database.

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Embeddings

Embeddings are numerical representations of the meaning of a text, image or data item, expressed as vectors — lists of numbers — in a multi-dimensional space.

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Vector database

A vector database is a storage system designed specifically to hold embeddings — numerical vectors that represent meaning — and to find, among millions of records, which ones are closest…

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Agentic Commerce

Agentic Commerce is the digital commerce model where autonomous AI agents act on behalf of a buyer—or a company—executing the complete purchase process: discovery, comparison,…

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AI Agent

An AI agent is a system built on one or more language models that can perceive a goal, plan a sequence of steps, and execute actions—querying data, invoking APIs, making intermediate…

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MCP

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard, introduced by Anthropic in November 2024, that defines a common way for language models and AI agents to connect with external tools,…

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Semantic search

Semantic search is an information retrieval method that finds relevant results based on the meaning of a query, not on literal word matching.

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AI personalization

AI personalization is the use of machine learning models and language models to adapt, in real time, which product, content, price, or message is shown to each user, based on their…

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Modern commerce architecture07

MACH architecture

MACH is an acronym describing four software architecture principles for digital commerce: Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless (a backend decoupled from the frontend).

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Headless Commerce

Headless Commerce is a digital commerce architecture in which the backend (catalog, inventory, checkout, business logic) is decoupled from the frontend (the interface the user sees).

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Composable Commerce

Composable Commerce is an architecture strategy in which a digital commerce platform is built by assembling independent, specialized components — search, catalog, checkout, promotions,…

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Cloud Native

Cloud Native describes applications designed from the ground up to run on elastic cloud infrastructure, taking advantage of containers, automatic orchestration and horizontal scaling.

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API First

API First is a software design approach in which the application programming interface (API) is designed and built before any user interface, treating it as the primary product rather…

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Microservices

Microservices are a software architecture style in which an application is built as a set of small, independent, specialized services, each responsible for a single business function…

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Headless CMS

A Headless CMS (headless Content Management System) is a content management system where the content — text, images, video, metadata — is stored and managed decoupled from how it is…

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Commerce data systems03