Naspers unit Prosus has introduced large commerce models (LCMs) – agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems that it says are set to replace traditional search and recommendation engines.
In a statement today, the company says the LCM has been trained on Prosus’s global database of commercial transactions, continually learning from over 500 million users and over 10 trillion tokens of data.
According to Prosus, this is a new operating system for e-commerce – a single integrated model which can power diverse tasks from improving basic search to personalised recommendations.
It notes that this LCM is already driving substantial impact both in immediate cost savings, in areas such as marketing spend, as well as spending on different models – it is 60 times cheaper to run than the best AI models with higher performance on ecommerce tasks.
It is also transforming the consumer experience from a manual, list-based experience to an intelligent, hyper-personalised system which understands consumer intent, such as “I want something special for dinner, to celebrate with friends,” the company adds.
It explains that unlike traditional recommendation systems, LCM has long-term memory, allowing it to learn from outcomes and refine strategies over time. This helps agents deliver hyperpersonal experiences across multiple interfaces – from voice assistants and augmented reality glasses to social video and in-car commerce.
Prosus notes that for nearly 30 years, e-commerce has relied on keyword search and recommendation engines – the online equivalent of walking down aisles in a supermarket trying to find the right product.
“LCM is a step-change in the consumer experience, a hyper-personalised system with long-term memory that learns from outcomes. It can reason about consumer intent and improves every time you interact with it. It is equivalent to having a personal shopper who understands what you want, why you want it, and how to match you to the best product available on the market,” it says.
“LCM is to e-commerce what a personal shopper is to a department store – only it costs consumers nothing extra, stays with you over time, and improves every time you use it,” says Fabricio Bloisi, CEO at Prosus.
“This is a whole new operating system for e-commerce. This will be available to our global network of companies we have invested in – adding immediate value to their tech stack, way beyond what they could develop on their own.”
“We have built an intelligent AI system which learns constantly by more than 200 billion data tokens every day,” says Euro Beinat, global head of AI at Prosus. “Traditional e-commerce has been good at cataloguing products and enabling transactions. We are now making it good at understanding consumer intent and reasoning.”
The firm says the LCM was first developed with iFood, Latin America’s largest food delivery platform, and is now trained together with the portfolio of Prosus Group companies, such as OLX, eMag and Despegar.
That gives it an unmatched ability to learn, adapt, and improve, creating a flywheel of insights that powers all Prosus’ businesses, it states.
“Restaurant owners actually called to thank iFood because the notifications felt so personal and human – some notifications even went viral,” says Zülküf Genç, director of AI at Prosus, leading the LCM team.
“People who had turned off push notifications started turning them back on. That's when we knew LCM wasn't just another recommendation engine – it's creating real connections that drive value at every touchpoint.”
Share