Shopify’s AI shopping agent is preparing to change everything, executives say

Shopify is gearing up for a lifelong transformation, said Harley Finkelstein, the company’s president. At this year’s Upfront Summit in Los Angeles, the longtime e-commerce veteran talked about how the company is fully committed to agent shopping.

Shopify is the second largest e-commerce provider in the United States after Amazon. But Finkelstein says only about 18% of retail purchases in the U.S. are made online. Agentic can change this by serving as a new front door for e-commerce sellers.

“We’re going to start using these agent applications as these kinds of personal shoppers,” he said, adding that the initial rollout will take time. Agent-based personal shoppers are predicted to be the future of shopping, allowing consumers to more effectively discover, buy, and compare products.

Finkelstein said agents bring context to shopping, something traditional search engines currently don’t do well. He gave the example of looking for athletic shoes. One of his favorite brands, he said, is On.

“In contrast to when you type sneakers into a search engine and Foot Locker comes up, Agentic is fundamentally performance-based,” he says. But once an agent shopper learns about On’s running shoe preferences, the next time they search for such shoes, agents will be more likely to represent On’s options over the options sold at popular mass retailers like Foot Locker.

I would like to point out that this is a little too simple. Today’s search engines already tailor shopping and search displays to users’ search and browsing history.

But it’s also true that agent shopping should someday be able to take personal preferences into account at a higher level.

“We’ll continue to be influenced by social media and the people we see on TV, but I think chat applications are actually more full-fledged personal shoppers because they’re generally uncommissioned, meaning they’re only going to show you what they think you’re most likely to buy,” he said.

He added that there are a lot of merchants on Shopify who are struggling to get their products discovered, and added, “In fact, we think Agenttic will play a big role in introducing new brands to these customers.”

He said Shopify is currently building an AI assistant for merchants called Sidekick. We’re also building protocols to help agents handle support issues and to help them better understand seller data such as product details. Overall, he believes agent shopping will play a new role in retail operations.

“We’re probably more excited than ever about this particular new commercial era,” he said, “because we think it’s going to create so many opportunities not just for large-scale sellers, but also for long-tail sellers.”