A vision-language model is a multimodal AI system that processes and reasons about both images and text simultaneously, understanding the relationship between visual and textual content. Examples include GPT-4V, Gemini, LLaVA, and Claude 3 Vision. VLMs can answer questions about images, generate text descriptions of visual scenes, perform visual question answering, and follow complex multimodal instructions. They are transforming how businesses interact with visual data — from analyzing product photos to reading charts and documents.