Essay

Totebot: an AI agent platform for e-commerce

2025

Totebot lets online stores build and deploy AI shopping assistants that sell and support customers around the clock, across web and chat.

The hard part wasn't the chat. It was making agents that behave reliably in front of real customers and real money. An assistant that hallucinates a discount or a product that doesn't exist is worse than no assistant. So the work was less about the model and more about the guardrails: grounding answers in the store's real catalog, keeping the agent inside what it's allowed to do, and making it configurable enough that a non-technical merchant can set it up.

What I built: the agent platform, the e-commerce integrations, and the config layer merchants use to deploy assistants without writing code.