Sustainable Shopping Advisor

AI-powered microservice for Online Boutique: SustainableAdvisor and Recommender agents provide real-time eco-friendly insights and smart product recommendations via GKE, ADK, A2A, and MCP.

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Inspiration

The Online Boutique demo is great, but it’s just a static microservices app.
We wanted to supercharge it with agentic AI, helping users discover eco-friendly products while showing how AI can extend microservices without touching the core code.

What it does

  • Fetches products from the Boutique catalog via MCP
  • Filters for sustainability using eco-tags and carbon scores
  • Sends shortlisted products to the Recommender Agent via A2A for final ranking
  • Returns a green, ranked recommendation list to the user
  • Provides a bookmarklet widget for instant integration on Online Boutique

How we built it

  • Base app: Online Boutique (GCP microservices demo)
  • Platform: Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
  • Agents: SustainableAdvisorAgent + RecommenderAgent using ADK
  • Protocols: MCP for catalog access, A2A for agent communication
  • Containerized: Each agent runs as its own microservice
  • Frontend: Lightweight JavaScript widget with glassmorphism design

Challenges we ran into

  • Service-to-service communication errors in Kubernetes DNS
  • JSON parsing and API response formatting issues from the Catalog Service
  • Managing multiple containerized agents and ensuring proper MCP/A2A integration
  • Keeping everything demo-ready under tight time constraints

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built a true agentic AI microservice on top of an existing system
  • Demonstrated inter-agent communication and sustainability ranking
  • Successfully deployed multiple AI agents in containers on GKE

What we learned

  • How to extend microservices externally without touching core code
  • Deploying AI-powered agents at scale using GKE and ADK
  • Handling MCP and A2A protocols in real-world scenarios
  • Designing lightweight, cross-platform UI widgets for instant integration

What's next for Sustainable Shopping Advisor

  • Gemini AI integration for richer natural language understanding
  • Mobile SDK and voice assistant integration for shopping on the go
  • Adding social sustainability metrics and carbon footprint calculators

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