A product discussed on AI Engineer.

The Agentic Commerce Stack — Ahnaf Prio, Best Buy
Aug 27, 2026 · 20:38
Ahnaf Prio, Senior Engineering Manager at Best Buy, argues agentic shopping now runs on standardized commerce primitives rather than browser automation, with 45% of agent sessions on ChatGPT and Gemini already touching shopping. He explains why screenshot/DOM agents failed and maps MCP, A2A, OpenAI's ACP, Google's UCP, and AP2 payment mandates. Merchants push product feeds because M merchants times N products does not scale; payments today use shared tokens or Google Pay. His live demo has his cat Jenny as a bakery agent on Cerebras at 3,000 tokens per second, showing checkout state transitions and an AP2 token with spend ceiling and revocation URL. He closes with evals for behavior, protocol compliance and latency, citing Chipotle's agent answering programming questions as a whack-a-mole caution.

Reverse-Engineering the AI Buyer — Aliisa Rosenthal, Acrew Capital
Aug 26, 2026 · 19:10
Aliisa Rosenthal, who helped take OpenAI's enterprise business from a couple million to several billion in revenue, argues founders should build the automated sales machine before hiring humans. ChatGPT launched with no enterprise features; nine months later they shipped an expensive product, but self-serve cannibalized it four months on. Advice: capture phone numbers at signup, reply to every inbound (10,000 a day), never give buyers homework, avoid pilots via reference calls, data evals, or 90-day opt-outs. $60 per user per month was too high; a low base fee plus usage spread. Automate security, don't pull up-market, hire AI-native sellers when buyers need contact, and use forward deployed engineers sparingly—scarce but sticky. First 10 customers should be handpicked design partners, and POCs aren't self-serve.

MCP UI: Extending the frontier — Liad Yosef and Ido Salomon, MCP Apps
May 6, 2026 · 22:21
In this episode, Ido Salomon and Liad Yosef explain MCP Apps, an MCP extension that lets tools send interactive, branded UI instead of plain text responses inside chat hosts like ChatGPT, Claude, VS Code, Cursor, and Copilot. They argue that text-based chat reduces companies to a wall of text, erasing identity, while MCP Apps preserves branding by returning HTML resources that hosts render as secure, interactive components. The architecture ensures every user click sends a message back to the host (not directly to the backend), keeping interactions in context—as demonstrated with a PostHog funnel analysis in Claude. Adoption includes Shopify, Hugging Face, GitHub, ChatGPT, and Claude, with ChatGPT recommending MCP Apps for building ChatGPT Apps. They note 800 million weekly ChatGPT users (10% of world population), calling this a once-in-20-years opportunity to rethink app distribution. Future work covers reusable views, model-UI interaction, and interoperability with generative UI protocols like A2UI and WebMCP, aiming to standardize UI in chat as the new web.

Forget RAG Pipelines—Build Production Ready Agents in 15 Mins: Nina Lopatina, Rajiv Shah, Contextual
Jun 27, 2025 · 1:15:43
Rajiv Shah, Nina Lopatina, and Matthew from Contextual AI demonstrate how developers can build production-ready RAG agents in minutes using Contextual AI's managed RAG platform, emphasizing that RAG should be treated as a managed service to avoid reinventing infrastructure. They walk through ingesting documents like NVIDIA financials and spurious correlation reports, then querying the agent with questions requiring quantitative reasoning across tables. The platform handles extraction, layout analysis, image captioning, hybrid retrieval, and a state-of-the-art reranker, capped by a grounded language model that avoids hallucinations and provides attribution. Evaluation is done via LM Unit, a model-as-judge that scores responses on criteria like accuracy and causation. The episode also shows integrating the agent with Claude Desktop via MCP and answers audience questions on pricing (consumption-based with a $25 credit), scalability, entitlements, HIPAA, and domain-specific language.
Powered by PodHood