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Hey friends! 👋

Today, we’re going to be blunt. We hear everything and its opposite about AI: “It will replace devs”, “It’s just a fad”, “You need to bet everything on GPT-4”.

If you’ve been following me a bit, you know I’m a pragmatist. I’m not interested in AI for writing poems, but for optimizing, selling and building. And I have a deep conviction, supported by what’s currently happening in research and industry:

The era of the “Leviathan” (one giant AI that does everything) is an illusion.

The future of e-commerce and PrestaShop development will not be played with a single omniscient digital brain, but with a team of specialized experts. And your new job? It will no longer be just about writing code, but about becoming the Conductor of this team.

Buckle up, we’re going to talk about modular architecture, carbon footprint, latency and above all, how to transform your PrestaShop store into a war machine thanks to AI Agents. 🚀

1. The Myth of the “Swiss Army Knife” AI (and why it doesn’t work in e-commerce)

We’ve all been amazed by ChatGPT. You ask it for a pancake recipe, it gives it to you. You ask it for PHP code, it does it (almost) well. So, the natural reflex is to say: “Great, I’m going to plug this thing into my PrestaShop and it will handle support, inventory, SEO and accounting!”

🛑 Stop. This is a major architectural error.

Why? For a simple reason that mathematicians call the “No Free Lunch” theorem. In short: you can’t be excellent everywhere.

The “Generalist” Problem

Imagine you hire one person to manage your store. They must be an expert in tax law, logistics, Symfony development, persuasive copywriting and customer psychology. It’s impossible. At best, they’ll be “average” everywhere.

A generalist AI (like the giant GPT-4 or Claude 3 Opus models), it’s the same:

It’s slow (Latency): To answer a simple question like “Do you have this T-shirt in red?”, a giant model mobilizes phenomenal computing power. In e-commerce, 100ms of latency is 1% less conversion. Don’t use a bazooka to kill a fly.

It’s expensive and polluting: Each query on a giant model consumes as much energy as a Google search x10. At the scale of a Black Friday, it’s an ecological and financial disaster.

It hallucinates: A model trained on all of the internet might invent promo codes that don’t exist or promise Sunday delivery.

In e-commerce, we don’t want “poetry”. We want precision. We want math. We want binary.

2. The Era of “Specialist Agents”: The Return to Modularity

This is where it gets exciting for us, the PrestaShop community. Our favorite CMS has always been right on one point: modularity.

PrestaShop works with Hooks and Modules. You don’t modify the Core to add a payment method. You graft an expert module.

AI is taking exactly the same path. We’re moving away from big monolithic models towards SLM (Small Language Models) and MoE (Mixture of Experts) architectures.

Concretely, what is it?

Instead of having an “AI God”, you’re going to have a constellation of very fast small agents, hosted locally or at lower cost, that only know how to do one thing, but do it perfectly.

🕵️ The Fraud Agent: It can’t write a poem, but it analyzes thousands of transactions (IP, velocity, average cart) to say “Validated” or “Rejected” in 50 milliseconds.

📦 The Logistics Agent: It knows your carrier’s API and your SQL stock status by heart. It answers factually: “Package shipped, delivery scheduled for Tuesday.”

🎨 The Merchandising Agent: It analyzes vectors (embeddings) of your products to suggest the right accessory.

This is called an agentic architecture. And guess what? It’s much more robust, secure and fast.

3. Concrete Application: How to Build This Today?

Enough theory. How do you set this up when you’re a dev or e-merchant on PrestaShop? The keystone of this new architecture is a concept that’s exploding: MCP (Model Context Protocol).

Think of MCP as a “universal USB plug” for AI. It allows an AI (Claude, ChatGPT, or a local agent) to connect to your tools in a standardized and secure way.

This is precisely to fill this gap that I developed MCP Tools Plus.

The idea is simple: transform your PrestaShop store into a real MCP Server. Instead of cobbling together Python scripts everywhere, you install the module, and boom: your store natively exposes its data and actions to your AI agents, in a controlled manner.

Scenario: “Augmented” Customer Support with MCP Tools Plus 🤖

Forget the chatbot that says anything. Here’s the workflow of a modern agentic system that you can prototype right now:

1. The Router (The dispatcher)

The customer sends a message: “Where is my order #12345?”. Your AI assistant (connected via MCP) analyzes the intent.

Verdict: It’s an “Order status” request.

Action: I use the get_order_status tool provided by the PrestaShop MCP server.

2. The Logistics Agent (The expert)

This is where the magic of MCP Tools Plus operates. The agent doesn’t try to guess. It executes the secure function exposed by the module.

  • It queries your PrestaShop in real time via the protocol.
  • PrestaShop responds (reliable data from the DB): Status: Shipped, Tracking: 1Z999...

3. The Response (The writer)

The agent takes this raw data and uses a lightweight language model to formulate an empathetic response: “Hello! Good news, your order #12345 is on its way…”

Result:

✅ 0 Hallucination: The AI didn’t invent the status, it read it via the MCP connector.

✅ Security: The agent only has access to the tools you’ve activated in the module. If the AI gets hacked (prompt injection), it can only do what the module authorizes.

✅ Simplicity: No need to code a complex API, the module does the bridging.

4. Vision: Become a Systems Architect

This is where your role changes.

Before, we were paid to write the get_order_status function. Today, AI can write this function in 2 seconds.

Tomorrow, we’ll be paid to design the system where Agent A talks to Agent B without breaking the store.

The key skills of the “E-commerce Developer 2026”:

1. Orchestration (Flow Engineering): Knowing how to design data flows between agents. Using tools like LangChain, n8n or MCP servers.

2. Hybridization: Knowing when to use AI (for fuzzy things, language) and when to use classic code (for math, strict logic). Reminder: Never ask an AI to calculate VAT, it’s a heresy! Make it call a calculator.

3. Data Sovereignty: Knowing how to deploy small models (like Mistral or Llama) directly on your servers. Why? To avoid sending your customers’ data to OpenAI. It’s a massive selling point for GDPR and confidentiality.

The Future Impact

This approach will democratize luxury features. Before, you had to be Amazon to have real-time fraud detection or intelligent 24/7 customer support. With tools like MCP Tools Plus and specialized agents, any PrestaShop store can offer this level of service.

But beware: this requires rigor. A poorly designed automated system can destroy a reputation in minutes. That’s why the human remains at the center, no longer as an executor, but as a supervisor.

Conclusion: Get on the Train Now 🚂

AI is not a magic wand that replaces everything. It’s a technological building block, just like PHP or SQL.

  • Those who try to solve everything with a “big prompt” in ChatGPT will fail (slow, expensive, imprecise).
  • Those who will succeed are those who will build modular systems, faithful to PrestaShop’s DNA: one module for each task, one expert for each problem.

My advice for this week?

Take a look at MCP Tools Plus and try to connect your first agent to your store. Start small: a simple agent capable of reading your stock. You’ll see, once you’ve tasted agentic architecture, there’s no going back.

This is the time to move from “AI user” to “AI architect”. And believe me, it’s a lot more fun!

Questions Fréquentes

What is an agentic architecture?

It’s an approach where instead of using a single massive generalist AI, you deploy multiple small specialized AI agents, each expert in a specific domain (fraud, logistics, merchandising). These agents work together in a coordinated manner, like a team of experts.

Why aren't large models like GPT-4 optimal for e-commerce?

Three main reasons - latency (response time too long for critical actions), cost (each query consumes a lot of resources), and risk of hallucination (the model can make up information). For specific tasks like validating a transaction, we need speed and precision, not creativity.

What is MCP (Model Context Protocol)?

It’s a standardized protocol that allows an AI to connect to your tools and systems securely. Think of it as a “universal USB plug” for AI, which allows your agents to interact with PrestaShop without having to code a complex API for each use case.

What is MCP Tools Plus?

It’s a PrestaShop module developed by Nicolas Dabène that transforms your store into an MCP server. It exposes your store’s data and actions in a standardized and secure way to your AI agents, enabling simple integration without hallucination.

Are Small Language Models less performant?

No, they are different. An SLM only knows how to do one thing, but does it perfectly and quickly. For specific tasks (analyzing a transaction, checking stock), a well-trained SLM will be faster, cheaper and more reliable than a giant model.

How do I get started with agentic architecture on PrestaShop?

Start small - install MCP Tools Plus, create your first simple agent (for example to read your stock), test the integration. Once you master the concept, you can gradually add other specialized agents for fraud, customer support, etc.