Redmond, a Utah company that has been mining natural salt since 1958 and now has more than 10 brands including Real Salt and Re-Lyte, built a production AI commerce agent in 10 weeks with a two-person team. The agent went live in February 2026 and handles thousands of customer conversations monthly with high accuracy, with full control over the system prompt and response guardrails and minimal ongoing maintenance after initial stabilization.
Redmond's managed AI customer service tool had given the team too little control over the AI's responses and the data behind them, which mattered because customers ask detailed questions about ingredients, product composition and sourcing. When that managed service was discontinued, applied AI developer Phillip Hinson and development team lead Jeremiah Payne decided to build their own. Hinson said: "We didn't build this to save money. We built it because we needed control"
Hinson started from Shopify's MCP reference app, which supplied the application scaffolding, authentication flows and MCP client integration, connected it to a development store and deployed to Azure with a CI/CD pipeline; getting the MCP connected took about a day. A sync pulls content from Redmond's blogs and web pages into a PostgreSQL database that serves as the RAG layer, and text embeddings created with Azure OpenAI are stored in a vector database for semantic retrieval. The conversational AI is powered by Anthropic's Claude, which interprets the question, decides when to search and composes the response. Prompt caching for Claude cut input token costs by up to 10x on cache hits and reduced overall AI spend by roughly half. Hinson also added token and tool usage tracking, purchase-to-conversation attribution, PKCE authentication, log sanitization and rate limiting through Azure App Insights, plus a "Talk to a Human" button that hands the chat to a live agent in HubSpot's chat widget.
The agent went live in February 2026, the same day the previous service was discontinued, with no service interruption. It handles product discovery, ingredient questions and routine order inquiries, and the Storefront MCP pulled a newly released protein powder from Shopify's Catalog automatically. Payne also used the Shopify MCP and Claude to migrate historical customer and order data from three legacy Shopify stores while Redmond consolidates four stores into one, eliminating a paid third-party app. Next, Redmond plans to add transactional capabilities, starting with refund and cancellation processing for unfulfilled orders.