How Shopify Is Turning AI Into a Strategic Advantage for Merchants

Shopify’s Winter 2026 release is here with over 150 new features for merchants, but the centerpiece is a sweeping suite of AI tools designed to do more than automate tasks. From a rebuilt Sidekick AI to agentic storefronts that help sellers control how their brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, Shopify is betting big on turning AI into a growth engine for its users.

“The biggest takeaway that I want folks to see is that we are intentionally making AI practical and something that is useful,” Vanessa Lee, Shopify’s vice president of product, tells The AI Economy in an interview. The company describes these updates as being part of a “RenAIssance,” highlighting that AI is a core focus of its additions. “We were really waiting for the moment when we felt like now is the right time to lend our AI…approach and make it front and center to merchants in this way,” she adds.

That time is now, according to Lee, thanks to the AI work Shopify has done this year and the advancements it has seen. “I think there are intentional AI features that are practical and useful, specifically for commerce. That’s the vibe, and ‘RenAIssance’ really spoke to that—AI has been around for a couple of years, but…when applied correctly, there’s a new frontier available…that we wanted that kind of optimism and heavy period of progress to show up.”

She stresses that her team was careful to ensure the AI announcements made today weren’t just demonstrations of nice features—they had to be “actually useful” for everyday merchants.

“Now that we’re here, we decided to go big and celebrate and make it central to the story,” Lee remarks.

Here’s a look at some of the company’s biggest AI releases.

Sidekick Gets an Upgrade

Shopify introduced Sidekick as part of its Summer 2024 Edition. It initially was an AI-powered commerce assistant that provided context and guidance to merchants to help them make decisions, complete tasks, and effectively use the platform’s features. However, it wasn’t widely used by merchants, Lee concedes, which led to a “big re-architecture shift” this spring.

“What’s the next chapter for Sidekick beyond just synchronous conversations?” she asks. Shopify was searching for a way to make it something more than the AI assistants typically associated with other SaaS platforms. Lee shares that her team set out to make Sidekick genuinely proactive, capable of anticipating a merchant’s next move rather than just responding when they get stuck. Drawing on Shopify’s deep commerce knowledge base, the company built a model that can also troubleshoot issues, flag conversion opportunities, surface checkout problems, and even recommend ways to curb customer churn.

What’s New With Sidekick?

With this upgrade comes new capabilities. Merchants can save, reuse, and share prompts, which Shopify calls “skills.” This includes launching quick actions from a tray or a slash command. Each user is limited to 25 skills, and with safe sharing, no store data or dangerous prompts will be passed through links. Shopify reveals that mobile and multi-skill prompts are coming soon.

Powered by the Polaris UI and the Admin GraphQL API, merchants can now use Sidekick to generate custom applications within the Shopify admin panel. No programming expertise is required, and the Flow automations can be inserted using a description, such as “tag customers who place an order over $200.” Once the app has been tested, it can be deployed, giving merchants the user interface that’s unique to their business.

Shopify is also releasing a developer preview of Sidekick App Extensions, giving app builders and merchants the ability to bring the data and functionality of Shopify’s AI agent into third-party apps. Lee discloses that Shopify will start working with partners in Q1 2026 to build out its ecosystem.

Your AI Cofounder

Instead of Sidekick being an assistant, Lee suggests it be viewed more as a co-founder. Because it contains extensive knowledge about the merchant and their store, it can operate behind the scenes to identify growth opportunities.

“Sidekick will probably not be your low-level employee. It’ll probably be a lot more like a good sounding board, a mentor for your business,” she declares, adding that the AI can alleviate the stress merchants face when running a business, even new ones who have so many questions about how to get started. “This is where Sidekick plays a role. It’s almost more like a coach, cofounder, mentor, that knows your business really well than it is doing the menial tasks.”

And despite comparing Sidekick to a cofounder, Lee wants to assure merchants that they will remain in charge. There will continue to be human checkpoints throughout the process, allowing for review of changes to a store, bundles created, and anything else the AI generates.

Launching Agentic Storefronts

As people are spending more time on AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot, Shopify wants to help merchants extend their reach to where their customers are. In a playbook similar to AEO, GEO, or whatever your preferred acronym is, the commerce company is introducing Agentic Storefronts, a set of tools designed to ensure a merchant’s products are discoverable and that a brand is authentic in agentic conversations.

“One of the biggest concerns that I hear from merchants is, if there are agents out there selling—let’s say not quite selling, but maybe having conversations with consumers about their shopping goals—I want to make sure my products are there, and I want to make sure that my brand shows up accurately. Everyone’s largest concern is, ‘How do I do that?’ Lee shares. Traditionally, merchants have made investments in their online store, using it to build a connection with their customers. But in the generative AI era, conversations on the internet are happening without the merchant, leaving them in the dark about how they’re showing up.

With Agentic Storefronts, merchants can ensure that their products and information aren’t being left out. Shopify provides a section in the admin panel where users can ensure their data is accurate. Initially, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot are the only chatbots supported, but more will be added in the future.

Once correctly configured, merchants no longer need to touch Agentic Storefronts. All their products will be syndicated and discoverable in AI chats everywhere. Shopify has disclosed plans to add additional merchandising controls in the coming weeks to help manage the syndication of product data.

Simulating Buyer Behavior

Another feature unveiled by Shopify is SimGym, a tool for merchants that provides a batch of AI shoppers to evaluate store changes before they’re pushed into production. It’s essentially an AI-powered mashup of a focus group, a developer sandbox, and an A/B testing environment.

“It’s a preparation space to stress test and understand how your site is going to perform with real users, real humans, visitors, and shoppers,” Lee explains. “We took all of our knowledge and understanding of how real customers go through an e-commerce site, in particular. This is AI focused on commerce, covering everything from Sidekick to SimGym. We take all our understanding of models, LLMs, and ML in general and apply it to commerce. It’s AI shopper simulators.”

SimGym is helpful for merchants who want to run A/B testing on their website but don’t have the traffic needed to do so effectively. Sellers will first specify what they want to test—whether it’s a redesign or a new campaign—and then run a simulation with AI shoppers. Then, feedback is collected and analyzed to understand the issues. Were these virtual shoppers able to successfully add something to their shopping cart and check out? What did they say in the process? Merchants will be able to identify the profiles of these AI shoppers and the goals they need to fulfill.

It’s perhaps akin to UserTesting, but wholly AI-powered. Shopify boasts that merchants can even see these shoppers in real time. “You actually get to watch these little AI shoppers in the UI go through the site simultaneously,” Lee quips. “You’ll see a whole bunch of sessions, like tiny browsers, and they’re starting to add stuff to their cart and navigate around. It’s really, really fascinating.”

Making ‘Vibe Entrepreneurship’ Happen

Have you ever had an idea in your head, but can’t quite articulate how to turn it into a business? Shopify has an answer for that called Tinker. It’s a new app that hasn’t launched yet—the company plans to release it in January 2026.

Tinker uses AI to solve the blank-canvas problem entrepreneurs face, helping generate product concepts. The company claims it consolidates all AI tools into a single app, saves merchants money on AI subscriptions, and enables merchants to create professional visuals without design experience.

“Tinker is really for the aspiring entrepreneurs, the people who have maybe the wisp of an idea and still haven’t really gotten around to making it a reality,” Lee points out. Although she describes it as an incubation app for ideas, commerce, and entrepreneurship, Tinker is also a reflection of Shopify—the company has invested in builders to “stoke the fire of entrepreneurship.”

Lee says that with Tinker, Shopify hopes AI can help entrepreneurs “take an idea which probably feels really amorphous in your brain and translate it into something tangible, [that] you can see, and then you can kind of evolve it.”

Other Updates

Shopify is giving its developer platform a full AI overhaul, enabling agents to take on the entire build process. According to the company, these bots can now spin up development stores, scaffold apps, run GraphQL operations, and generate validated code across its stack, from the admin and UI extensions to Liquid, Shopify’s theme-templating language, and Hydrogen, its React-based framework for custom headless storefronts.

The developer platform also supports natural language queries and working, validated code with direct Shopify.dev links. Shopify has also added server-side rendering for LLM access, helping AI agents retrieve more accurate, context-rich information.

Starting today, developers can tap into Shopify Catalog, the platform’s global product database. By opening access to this information, Shopify aims to accelerate the creation of smarter, agent-driven shopping experiences. “We’re actually making the catalog API available, writ large, to all partners on Shopify, because we also think that there’s not just those large partners (Microsoft and Perplexity). AI will probably change even new consumer behaviors that we haven’t thought of yet,” Lee says.

Finally, Shopify is launching the Dev Dashboard, a hands-on playground for building agentic commerce experiences. Developers can experiment with Shopify Catalog, checkout tools, APIs, MCPs, SDKs, and other platform capabilities to craft fully integrated AI-driven shopping workflows.

“We’re making every Shopify store agent-ready by default,” Tobi Lütke, Shopify’s chief executive, is quoted in a statement. “Shopify is the easiest solution for merchants who want AI agents to find their storefronts, understand their products, and complete transactions.”

Shopify is positioning itself at the center of the AI commerce surge, ensuring every store is agent-ready and every tool—from Sidekick to Tinker—is built to help merchants grow, experiment, and reach customers wherever they are. “One of the things that we understand, probably more than anyone, being the online store company, is that your brand presence online is super important, and your story is what differentiates your business at the end of the day,” Lee says.

She notes that a new gold rush is underway—one focused on delivering the best AI-powered consumer experiences. Shopify’s rollout of new tools is designed to help merchants of all sizes get ahead. By making these solutions widely accessible, the company positions itself as a guide through the fast-changing AI commerce landscape, ensuring sellers can lead while keeping their brand and story front and center.

Featured Image: Shopify's Sidekick AI agent can generate applications for merchants using natural language prompts. Credit: Shopify