Forget the search bar. The future of ecommerce is an artificial intelligence (AI) that understands what you want, even when you can’t quite put it into words.
Global tech investor Prosus has just launched its Large Commerce Model (LCM), an agentic AI system designed to completely replace traditional search and recommendation engines.
Trained on a unique global database from its portfolio of companies, the LCM continually learns from over 500 million users and trillions of data points.
Prosus calls it a “new operating system for ecommerce” – a single, integrated model that powers everything from basic search to hyper-personalised recommendations.
Goodbye Search, Hello Personal Shopper
For decades, online shopping has relied on the same basic formula: keyword search and generic recommendations.
Prosus argues this is the digital equivalent of wandering supermarket aisles.
The LCM is a radical step away from that. It has long-term memory, learns from outcomes, and can reason about complex consumer intent, like understanding “I want something special for dinner, to celebrate with friends.”
“LCM is to ecommerce 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,” said Fabricio Bloisi, CEO at Prosus and Naspers. “This is a whole new operating system for ecommerce.”
Fabricio Bloisi, CEO of Prosus and Naspers
Built for Scale, Driven by Data
The model was first developed with iFood, Latin America’s largest food delivery platform, and is now trained with data from other Prosus companies like OLX and eMag. This creates a powerful “flywheel” of insights, where each company benefits from the collective learning.
“We have built an intelligent AI system which learns constantly by more than 200 billion data tokens every day,” said Euro Beinat, Global Head of AI at Prosus and Naspers.
“Traditional ecommerce has been good at cataloguing products and enabling transactions. We are now making it good at understanding consumer intent and reasoning.”
Real-World Results: 4x More Orders
This isn’t just a lab experiment; the LCM is already live and delivering staggering results, especially on iFood:
Push Notifications: Achieved a 4x uplift in orders with click-through rates consistently beating all previous benchmarks.
Personalization: Conversion rates for “you may also like” suggestions increased by 66%.
Efficiency: The system operates at a cost 60 times lower than leading proprietary AI models in a similar class.
Perhaps the most compelling feedback came from the users themselves.
“Restaurant owners actually called to thank iFood because the notifications felt so personal and human – some notifications even went viral,” said 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.”
With its ability to understand intent, learn over time, and act autonomously, Prosus’s LCM signals a fundamental shift from a passive, catalog-based web to an intelligent, agent-driven future for how we shop online.
