Shopify doubles down on AI with tools to create online stores, shopping assistants
Summary
With the chatbot now equipped with advanced reasoning capabilities, Shopify’s vice-president of product Vanessa Lee says merchants can turn to Sidekick with more practical questions like, “My sales dropped last month — what caused that?” Sidekick will then trawl through the store’s analytics, including sales figures, order history, product performance and customer purchase patterns. In addition to Sidekick, Shopify is also deploying AI within its other software, so merchants can input a few descriptive keywords to instantly design online stores and all the images and text that go with them. The capability is being built on Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives. Rick Watson, founder of RMW Commerce Consulting, saw the updates as a sign that Shopify “is moving ahead fast” on AI, but said it will be years until the company really reaps some of the benefits from developments like the model context protocol. Away from AI, Shopify said Wednesday that it has redesigned its point-of-sale app to make workflows more intuitive and upgraded its payments platform so merchants can use a single store to sell from multiple business entities globally.