Sentry AI

Inspiration

None of us set out to build another chatbot. We kept hearing the same story from small business owners around us: "I lost that customer because I didn't see the message in time." A boutique owner in Lagos discovering a product inquiry on TikTok three hours after posting it. A real estate agent replying to a WhatsApp lead only to find the same person had already messaged on Instagram and gone cold waiting.

There are a lot small businesses in Nigeria, and almost every one of them is fighting the same invisible war: one person, one phone, six or seven platforms, and customers who expect a reply in minutes, not hours. Existing tools like Respond.io solve this for enterprise teams in the US and Asia, starting at $159/month, and none of them understand Nigerian Pidgin or connect to Paystack or Flutterwave. We built SentryAI to close that gap.

What it does

SentryAI is an AI autopilot agent that connects to WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, TikTok, Twitter/X, and Email, reads every incoming message with Qwen, and responds automatically in a humanized tone that matches the business. It:

Understands Nigerian Pidgin, local slang, and voice notes (transcribed via Qwen multimodal)
Scores every lead as Hot, Warm, or Cold based on buying intent
Auto-generates a Paystack or Flutterwave payment link the moment a customer is ready to buy
Follows up automatically at 24 and 48 hours if a lead goes quiet
Sends the owner a morning report summarizing yesterday's messages, leads, and revenue
Lets the owner take over any conversation with one tap, no friction

Everything shows up in a single PWA dashboard: unified inbox, lead pipeline, AI activity log, and revenue tracker, installable straight to a phone without an app store.

How we built it

We split into four roles and worked in seven-day sprints. Day one was foundation: standing up the Express backend on Alibaba Cloud, getting the first Telegram webhook live, and wiring up Supabase. Day two was the AI agent core: Qwen reading and classifying messages, a humanizer layer for tone and Pidgin awareness, and lead scoring. Day three added the business logic, payment link generation, buying-intent detection, follow-up sequences, and human takeover mode. Day four was the dashboard: unified inbox, lead pipeline, activity log, and the morning report. The last two days were stress testing, offline queueing, PWA polish, and getting everything deployed.

Stack: Node.js/Express backend on Alibaba Cloud, Qwen Cloud API as the AI brain, Supabase (Postgres) for data, React + TypeScript + Tailwind + Framer Motion for the frontend, deployed as a PWA on Vercel.

Challenges we ran into

Getting seven different platform APIs (Meta's three, Telegram, TikTok, Twitter/X, Gmail) to feed into one unified message queue without losing platform-specific context was harder than expected, each one has its own webhook shape and rate limits. Tuning Qwen to sound like a real Nigerian staff member instead of a generic assistant took real iteration; getting Pidgin right without sounding like a caricature was a balance we kept adjusting. We also had to build an offline message queue and stress test for 50 concurrent messages, since a lot of our target users are on patchy connections and low-end Android phones.

What we learned

That the hardest part of "AI agent" products isn't the AI, it's the plumbing. Getting messages to flow reliably across seven platforms, handling failures gracefully, and keeping state consistent across a distributed system mattered more than prompt engineering. We also learned how much local context changes what "humanized" means. A response that sounds natural in Lagos can sound completely robotic if it doesn't adapt to Pidgin, tone, or the specific rhythm of how people actually text there.

What's next for SentryAI

Full rollout of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter/X integrations (currently live on WhatsApp, Telegram, and Email), expanding language support beyond Pidgin and English, and multi-business support so an owner running two or three storefronts can manage them all from one account.