In 2003, Jim Gray — Turing-laureate, the database godfather, the author of the transaction — wrote a quiet paper called Distributed Computing Economics. One observation reshaped how anyone serious thinks about systems at scale: data has gravity. Compute should orbit it. Every retail stack since has been building in the opposite direction. Cerniam inverts the orbit.
Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Databricks. Connectors, ETL, schemas, orchestration. Every Module a retailer adds is one more pipeline to maintain — another copy of the customer, another reconciliation, another lag.
Source systems stay where they are. Cerniam taps them in flight, composes the answer in a live operational graph, and dispatches decisions to whichever Module needs to act. Nothing gets copied. Nothing gets staged.
The value of this customer in this moment, composed in real time across every domain that touches them. Where CLV looks backward at a lifetime, ICV looks at right now — and most stacks can't see it because they're built on stale data.
Account exists, customer logged in, last-purchase date, loyalty tier, lifetime spend. The signal everyone has and everyone uses.
Lives in · CRM, warehouse, historyPropensity-to-purchase, churn risk, segment membership, predicted CLV. ML-derived but trained on historical batches — good direction, stale specifics.
Lives in · ML pipelines, batch featuresSession intent, cross-domain context, life-stage signals, environmental cues, intent-from-elsewhere. Visible only to architectures that compose in real time. This is the alpha.
Lives in · the OKG · composed liveModules are the systems retailers already run. The chassis carries Identity, Memory, Brain, Reasoner, Event Bus, and Audit — six named services that make every Module open to every other. Plug-Ins ride on the chassis and inherit the context for free.
Six named services. One operational knowledge graph. Every Module open to every other.
Every SaaS in the swarm tastes great in the demo. Every SaaS drags an integration tax behind it. Cerniam keeps the capability and collapses the bill.
| Capability | Typical SaaS swarm | Cerniam Plug-In |
|---|---|---|
| Decline Recovery | Forter · Riskified · PSP add-ons · custom retry stacks | Decline Recovery |
| Chargeback | Verifi · Ethoca · Chargebacks911 · Justt | Chargeback |
| Save-the-Sale | Bluecore · Wunderkind · Klaviyo flows · Listrak | Save-the-Sale |
| Repricing | Aura · RepricerExpress · PROS · custom rules engines | Repricing |
| Fraud | Signifyd · Sift · Forter · Kount · Riskified | Fraud |
| Offer Intelligence | Bloomreach · SFMC · Adobe Target · Dynamic Yield | Offer Intelligence |
| Identity (CDP) | Segment · mParticle · Tealium · Adobe RTCDP · Treasure Data | Identity |
Mid-market $2B retailer · 30 SaaS contracts · steady-state.
No account. No purchase history. Mid-week visit. CRM looks at this session and sees a low-confidence anonymous browser. Cerniam looks and sees a customer with an ICV through the roof — and a 50% chance of being lost to a competitor if nobody acts.
Anonymous browser. ZIP geolocates to Phoenix suburb. Third visit this week. Cart: $200 of plywood, lumber, insulation. Baseline ICV. Treated like every anonymous browser. Generic experience. The session probably ends with a small purchase or no purchase.
Cerniam computes: probable 18-month basket of $8,000–$15,000 across 4–6 visits as the renovation proceeds. Switching risk: ~50% if no relationship is captured this session.
This is not a $200 customer. This is an $8K customer in disguise.
Without ICV: a $200 anonymous transaction, then silence.
With ICV: a $10,000 customer relationship
captured in the first 30 seconds — before they tab back to the competitor.
PSP sees the auth seam. Cerniam composes issuer mood, session urgency, paycheck-cycle detection, and cross-channel signal — recovering $11.5M–$18.5M of incremental GMV every year, after PSP does its best.
Every online card payment travels through 3DS2. Most merchants ship a thin packet — cardholder, device, transaction. Cerniam's Gateway inspects the Brain at the moment of authorization and composes a packet enriched with all three tiers of signal.
Issuer authenticates with full context. Friction drops. Approvals rise.
Cerniam is an applied AI laboratory building the retail intelligence layer. Project Woven is the internal name for the connectivity layer being built by Cerniam Labs — one chassis with six named services, every Module open to every other, and a growing library of Plug-Ins that inherit the context for free.
We're not pitching a vision. We're moving intelligence to the data — across the stack retailers already run — and pricing the integration tax that nobody else wants you to look at.
Built in collaboration with Lab 36.
If you're running a retail stack and tired of paying the integration tax — or if you want to see ICV in motion — we'd love to walk you through it.