WhatsApp AI commerce agent for African SMEs - bilingual (English/Swahili), grounded in the shop catalog, collects payment via real M-Pesa STK push.
# Hermes — WhatsApp AI Commerce & Support Agent for African SMEs
In Kenya and much of Africa, **WhatsApp is the storefront and M-Pesa is the checkout.** Small business owners lose hours a day answering the same questions, taking orders by hand, and chasing payments — and lose sales entirely after hours. Hermes is an AI agent that handles all three, in the channels customers already use.
A business connects its WhatsApp number and Hermes:
1. **Answers FAQs** grounded in the business's own catalog and info (so it never invents a price).
2. **Takes orders** conversationally, extracting items, quantities, and delivery details into structured data.
3. **Collects payment** by triggering an **M-Pesa STK push** and confirming when paid.
4. **Hands off to a human** the moment it's unsure or the customer asks — it never fakes competence.
5. Gives the owner a **dashboard**: deflection rate, orders captured, revenue collected, and cost per conversation — value stated in shillings.
## Live demo
**Try it:**
huggingface.co
Chat with the agent (English or Swahili/Sheng — try `nataka 2 unga na 1 cooking oil`), press the "enter M-Pesa PIN" button to run a payment end-to-end, and watch the owner dashboard update. The demo runs on the built-in simulators; the same code runs on real WhatsApp + M-Pesa when credentials are set (below).
## What's real vs. what you plug in
This is a real, connectable product, not a mock. To be precise about the line:
**Real and working in the code (here now):**
- The actual **Meta WhatsApp Cloud API** integration — webhook verification handshake, inbound-message parsing, and outbound sending via the Graph API.
- The actual **M-Pesa Daraja** flow — OAuth token, STK-push (`processrequest`), status query, and callback parsing, against sandbox or production.
- A provider-agnostic **LLM** layer that runs on Groq's free tier or OpenAI by config.
- Multi-tenant catalog/knowledge, grounded pricing, order capture, huma …