Shopify plugs in more AI power to merchant assistant

Shopify unveiled major upgrades to Sidekick, its AI-powered commerce assistant for merchants, at the company’s recent Editions event, a biannual gathering where the tech giant unveils a flurry of new products.

On Wednesday, S​​hopify said it has made significant investments in Sidekick as part of its AI transformation strategy. “[This] Editions moment is all about the AI renaissance,” Amanda Engelman, director of product at Shopify, told Retail Brew. “We are in, obviously, a very transformative moment across so many different functions, but something that we care very deeply about at Shopify, too, is how do we use AI to supplement the creativity to allow our merchants to move faster, to help them understand their gaps or their opportunities significantly quicker?”

The AI assistant, which first launched in 2023, will also be able to build custom admin apps for Shopify merchants that developers are typically hired to do. Overall, Shopify is adding an AI layer to Sidekick that automates things like backend support and implementation tasks for merchants, eliminating the need for technical expertise.

For instance, Sidekick will now be able respond to prompts like “tag customers spending over $200” and create the automation workflow visually for merchants.

“It’s the natural evolution of Shopify’s objective to make commerce easier for its merchants,” Sky Canaves, eMarketer principal analyst for retail and e-commerce, told Retail Brew, adding, “I think now we’ll start to see Sidekick and other platforms trying to do similar things, where they’re moving from just being generative AI assistants, like chatbots, into more proactive agents that can do more and execute tasks or provide much deeper insights that can support business operations.”

Plus, merchants will be able to describe what they need to Sidekick in plain language, and it can build custom admin apps using Shopify’s UI framework and GraphQL API—no coding required.

Sidekick will be able to understand commands like “make this button rounded” or “use more modern fonts” so merchants can customize their Shopify stores instantly. Sidekick will also be able to save and share frequently used prompts, or “skills,” for quick actions. Merchants can store up to 25 skills, the company said.

However, Mark William Lewis, CEO at Netalico, told Retail Brew he would wait to see how these upgrades work in practice.

“Mature merchants don’t trust this stuff yet,” Lewis wrote in an email, adding that Shopify has the data to know what works and what doesn’t. If error rates drop, merchants might trust Sidekick for low-stakes tasks. “The question is whether they can get the reliability high enough before merchants just tune it out entirely,” he said.