Agentic Commerce PoC @ Harness Engineering Hack in SF

Below is a short demo of the agentic commerce prototype I built at the Harness Engineering Hack last week in San Francisco.

The given challenge was to “build an agent that does something on the web”. I wanted to build something where agents could shop on the user’s behalf, but since OpenAI rolled back its purchase integration (and other agents never supported it), that wouldn’t make for a good product at this point in time.

So I switched the approach to first focus on small businesses’ offerings. The tool gives owners the ability to set up and manage a website for humans and agents right from their phone via WhatsApp (integrated via Twilio, hosted on Render). Customers can then either browse the website, get a printable menu, and order with their agent via the MCP server (which for now needs to be manually added, and payments need to be done outside of the chat interface).

While it’s far from a publishable product, it was interesting to see how much one can build in a few hours from scratch, and where the baseline is at right now. From a systems perspective what’s interesting is the combination of the shop owner and customer roles, and the distinct permissions required for each channel and agents operating on their respective behalf.

Here you can see the final version in action: First the owner sets up the shop and iterates on the design. The customer queries the menu, enters an order, and then pays. Finally the owner marks the order as ready, and the customer is notified to pick it up.