AI · 2025
Providence Hub AI Ordering Assistant
A WhatsApp-native AI assistant that takes customer orders, collects payment and routes fulfilment without human intervention.
Providence Hub AI Ordering Assistant
Conversation flow n8n orchestration Order dashboard
The problem
Orders arrived as unstructured WhatsApp messages at all hours. Staff retyped them into spreadsheets, missed messages during peak hours, and reconciliation at the end of the day was guesswork.
The solution
An n8n orchestration layer receives every WhatsApp Cloud API event, passes context to Gemini for intent and item extraction, confirms the order back to the customer in plain language, triggers the payment step, then writes a normalised record to Supabase and notifies the fulfilment channel. Everything runs in Docker behind Cloudflare.
Features
- Natural customer conversations on WhatsApp
- AI-driven ordering with menu awareness
- Payment workflow with confirmation handling
- Automatic order routing to the right branch
- Structured order database in Supabase
- End-to-end automation with retries and alerts
Lessons learned
Conversation design matters more than model choice. Constraining the assistant to a small set of confident actions — and handing off gracefully when unsure — produced far better outcomes than a cleverer prompt.