AI & Commerce: The Future of Shopping is Here!

Oh, okay. Wow, this is a packed room. It is so good to see everyone. What do you guys think about Dev so far? Come on. >> [applause and cheering] >> This is our now third dot Dev together. And this room is so special. I'm always so grateful to be get to get to be a part of dot Dev. And taking a break from your day-to-day, traveling here, we know it's a lot of commitment and so we work really hard to make sure that this is a productive use of time. You're going to meet a lot of Shopify folk in the next couple days and our goal is that you're going to walk away with a better understanding of what we're all building together. But, for the next 30 minutes, I got you all to myself. And so I'm going to share a bit about what I'm excited about and the things that we're building. Okay, I want to talk about three topics

today. One, agentic commerce, of course. Two, our commerce platform, the thing that backs every single checkout on Shopify. And then three, we're going to do a check-in on our friend Sidekick. Okay, so let's jump into agentic commerce. If if agentic commerce isn't the buzzword of 2026, I actually don't know what will be. And there's a lot of hot takes about agentic, where it's going, how much traction it's had so far. But before we go into agentic, I want to take a step back for a second. When I think about agentic commerce, what I really see is actually just another change in how customers find trust with merchants they want to purchase from. Trust is the thing that facilitates all commerce. And that's something that we have to remember in all times of change. Commerce has always been about connecting people. Humans engage in purchases because they feel a certain trust with the brands and the people behind them. Remember the times when you used to shake hands during trades? We talked to retail associates about the products that they're trying to sell. We even follow people to that we like to understand the brands that they recommend. Trust is a required in every single transaction in commerce. And how that trust form between a customer and a and a merchant changes over time, but at Shopify we try and study this to make sure that our merchants are at the forefront of every change. Earlier this year, we launched with our

friends OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. Agentic commerce is not just a demo anymore. There are actually real transactions happening every single day on the platform. And it's still early and albeit, you know, traction has been slow to take off, but at this point halfway through the year, it is undeniably growing. Nearly every product category on Shopify is seeing meaningful AI growth. And based on our data, AI now converts 80% better than organic search. And 50% of AI sessions land on a PDP. Most of the time when AI is in the loop, the website is still in play. The site, how it feels, how fast it is, the story that it tells, it's still a really important part of the transaction. It helps people understand the subconscious signals of the brand and whether they can trust it. It also, but landing on the PDP also means that AI is starting to help people not just discover the brands and the websites that they like, but also the products that they want. It's doing the work to compare all of the facets of every single product and land them right in the product page. And when we look at which product categories are doing well, it's really categories that have standardized comparable attributes. Things like electronics, supplements, watches. These are the things that people can already go through and find exactly the product that they want. And it makes sense because all of these attributes can be expressed in text. Text, numbers, these are things that are easy for the agent to understand and it's actually more likely to be in product pages already. But how about things like fashion, apparel, lifestyle? lifestyle? We don't buy these things just based on things that are like width, height, color, things that are just text and numbers. We buy them based on vibes, to be honest. How do you measure the cool factor of a shirt? How can you tell if this dress is formal enough for a wedding? If AI is going to be useful to

consumers, it's going to have to shop for all of these types of products as well. And that's why we're investing in our ability to help classify products based on fuzzier attributes. Things like formalness, occasion, comfort, trending, the list goes on. The agent can use these attributes to filter for the right products based on what it's looking for and what it knows about the customer. These predictions will mean that agents can actually find the right products and continue to get better at helping to guide conversions in conversations. And once we do that, once we help agents find the right products, I do think we're also going to start to see more agents building carts and helping with checkout and post-purchase. But the good news is that if you're on Shopify, you are already ready for all of this. We have built the rails to support every scenario. And there's a lot that you can build with it. And so I figured I was like, why don't we show you with a little demo? So last week, I

had this Hermes app that I use. And and I talked to it through WhatsApp. It was a little bit hot here in Toronto. The weather's been a little bit unpredictable. So I said, "Okay, give me Help me find a hat." And it's really quick, but I can actually go in and connect it with Shop. Now Shop knows everything about me. It knows my family, what what my kids like. It also knows all of the purchases that I have made in the past. And actually this skill our team has now committed inside of Hermes. So every Hermes user has access to this. And so once Hermes kind of tells us what it's thinking, we see all the code. I actually found this Norse hat. It was a gorgeous hat. I was like, "Okay, let's go and check out." What does checkout look like within chat? So what Hermes is going to do now, it's going to create a cart. It's going to create a checkout for me. And then with a single tap, I'll be able to check out. Yes. >> [applause] >> [applause] >> Okay. >> Okay. So that was a really cool demo. But there are so many other interesting ways that AI is going to change commerce. It's not just conversations. And so I kind of challenged the team earlier this year. And if you've been paying attention on Editions, you'll have seen this perhaps. I asked them, "Let's make some really creative ways to shop that include AI, but also make use of the catalog and it's not just conversation." And what came out of it blew our minds a bit. >> [snorts] >> [snorts] >> We had a ton of interesting apps. Take

Pippin. Pippin is a British dice that helps your kids find games to play. Or Allset. This is an app that helps you find a travel wardrobe based on where you're going. Or a horoscope app that given your reading, tells you what you might need to approach the day ahead. Apparently, Mercury's in retrograde. I don't really know what that means, but apparently, you need a pocket journal. Okay. And behind all of these demos is UCP and our catalog. UCP models the full shopping journey in a way that any app can understand. And because all Shopify stores support UCP out of the box, if an app can speak UCP, it can buy from any Shopify merchant. The discovery portion of UCP is actually powered by our catalog that we talked about earlier. It's the search API that spans every single merchant on Shopify. It's something we've worked on for the last 2 years. And remember those fuzzy attributes that I talked about? That's us committing to us making the catalog better and better for not just agents, but any app that you can create. Last month, we announced two important

features for the catalog. These are two of my favorite ones. One is personalization and the ability to get earn a commission on every single conversion. So, personalization and commission. Now, Now, if an app developer combines our sign in with Shop component with the catalog, and a user uses it to log in, all the search results are automatically re-ranked based on what Shop knows about that user. And then, of course, if there's a conversion, now that app developer can earn an income. So, take Pippin, for example, the voice agent we just talked about. It's powered by our catalog. And if I give it my identity using Shop login, the catalog API returns results based for me. Now, my I have two boys, so that's why you see everything being Minecraft. I'm not a huge Minecraft fan myself, but, you know, 8-year-old boys love it. Right? And if I buy any of these products, now the app developer who built Pippin can make money. It's only been a month, but some of you have went ahead and built some really interesting things already. It's really fun to see you guys playing around with this. I like to think about it this way. As software gets more democratized, software will get more personal and interesting and niche. There'll be more applications built in the next 2 years than in the last 10. I have a bet going with the team that we're going to start to see more and more shopping experiences now than ever. And merchants will want to show up in all of the relevant ones. On the merchant side, we want to make sure it's easy to [clears throat] control where you're showing up and understand how you're performing. So, inside of Agentyc storefronts, you can now easily see your products, you can see how they're performing, how you could improve it, and you can also control which channels you're showing up for. This includes everything that everything from major Agentyc channels like OpenAI all the way to all of those niche experiences that the catalog powers. Every Shopify store now has a single place to go so that merchants know how to navigate all of this change. Yeah, I can see it will. Let's do that. Okay, enough about Agentyc commerce. Let's talk about the platform that

powers everything. Sometimes lost in all this AI talk, we forget about actually how complex every single checkout is. Each time an order is placed, we have to make sure the inventory is there, the price is correct, the discounts are are calculated. We have to make sure that the minimum shipping threshold is met, and then we reduce the shipping cost accordingly. We have to make sure that the loyalty points are included. Every single time a checkout happens, all of these things are reliably executed. And this happens millions of times every single day on Shopify. So, let's dedicate some time to talk about our commerce platform and what we're doing to make it even better. And let's start with products. Last month, we released two features, variant level publishing and discount stacking. Can I get a hand for that? Yeah. Come on. >> [applause] >> The team works really hard on these features. I know there are ones we were waiting for and so we wanted to make sure we get them right. And now you can finally choose which variants you want to publish to which channel and you can manage all of your discounts and which one stack using tags. So, this is really, really helpful and they're already available now. But, what else are we doing? We're following it up with our biggest

update to collections in the last decade. Collections are super important to how you manage and merchandise your site and your products and it matters to conversion, but they're kind of hard to maintain. So, we're changing all of that today. Today. Collections can now contain several data sources, products that map specific that match specific collections, conditions, or even other come from other collections themselves. We want to give you the ability to control exclusions, something that you guys have asked for for a long time. And for the app developers in the room, there's an opportunity to build for collections now with the new extension point. Now apps can provide products within collections and merchants can control exactly where products show up within it. It's also very beautiful to look at and manage. Last, we introduced the ability to do variant only collections. So, now I can go ahead and make this collection only green. >> [applause] [applause] >> Okay. >> Okay. Putting this all together, collections are now becoming not just the organizational mechanism to manage your storefront. It's becoming the organizational mechanism to manage products at all, even for back office. Okay, from products let's move on to

inventory. The blood in the circulatory system of commerce. Inventory is money and so accuracy is extremely important. We know this and we've been working to make sure in the last year that inventory is never lost. At the beginning of this year, we launched something a little quietly in the background of Shopify. We launched a double-sided ledger. Every inventory movement in Shopify is now accounted for. And we know exactly where it is going and where it has come from. This is extremely important and took a lot of energy and work to make sure we did right without messing up any merchants inventory in the meantime. And we want to model even complex inventory workflows. So soon, you're going to start start to see the concept of bins inside of Shopify. Essentially a location within a location. It gives us the ability to model your front of house differently from your back of house so that when you want to route online orders and what's available to sell through there, you can only say, "I only want to sell from the stuff in the back of the house." This has been super critical for a lot of merchants, especially those on point of sale. All of this gives us the ability to model physical inventory so that we can more accurately figure out how much you want to sell and where to route the shipping and fulfillment. Okay. Okay. Speaking of shipping and fulfillment, so far we've shipped split shipping and ship and carryout. I like that one clap. that was good. >> [applause] >> Okay. This gives more merchants more flexibility in how they want to make sure their their fulfillments happen and how customers receive their actual physical goods. And today, I'm excited to share that ship and pick up is now available on test drive. This is something we've been working on for a while. This is ready for holiday season 2026. If you're an app developer who has been working on the platform in the fulfillment space, you got to make sure that your app now is able to expect multiple fulfillments in one order. Without that, it'll be really hard to to get this in merchants' hands before before the holiday season. But we're super excited to see this come to life. Okay. So, all of these features are incredible for merchants, but we haven't talked about the developers in the room yet. So, to support all of these features,

all the apps that you guys build are incredibly important to making sure that businesses run smoothly. But I if I've heard one thing from developers, is that they have struggled with webhooks. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That's good. This is probably the only ubiquitous area across all app product categories that we've heard about, and so we decided to do something about it this year. With our new events API, now you can use our events platform and subscribe to only the events that you care about. And And every payload, you can define exactly what data you want to get back. This is good. Oh, yeah. Thank you. >> [applause] >> This is going to mean that you have to build a lot less infrastructure and a lot less code, which is a very good thing. And last [snorts] month, we gave you events platform for products and customers. But today, we're rolling it out for three more. Orders, collections, inventory. We're going to get >> [applause] >> We're going to get full coverage across the resources that we think you all need to keep your apps running well. Okay. So, to recap, So, to recap, today we're rolling out a complete overhaul of collections. Inventory is going to get way more accurate with the double-sided ledger and with the introduction of bins. And three, shipping pickup is now available and going to be ready for holiday season. These are just a few of the features we're launching right now. And I couldn't fit everything into this deck, or I'd be here for like 45 minutes or more. But all of the workshops and the talks during the next couple days will go through a lot more that the team has been cooking. Okay. Now, let's talk about something

else. Let's talk about my little friend, Sidekick. Look at him. Also, that is a real dot dev sweater that you can go buy. All right. Sidekick launched about two years ago, and the uptake has been incredible. I mean, we knew it was going to be good, but I don't think we like it's always kind of gratifying to see it come to life. And to be honest, it's kind of caught us by surprise just how much merchants love it. We've gotten a lot of love. Internally, it kind of felt like merchants were kind of egging us on, encouraging us. Yes, we want more of this, more of this. And so, we decided to give it that. Skills, pulse, voice, email. We've launched a lot of new capabilities on Sidekick to make it more valuable. And trust me, we are far from done. In terms of usage so far, merchants have collectively created 32 million analytics reports with Sidekick. They've made 25 million theme edits through Sidekick. And they've created 3.4 million customer segments. segments. That's some incredible scale and it's only been truly 18 months. We only launched flow automation a couple months ago, but already we have 600,000 flow automations that Sidekick has created that now run every day to help merchants optimize their business. We have never seen merchants adopt a tool like they have adopted Sidekick. And trust me, we're just getting started. In June, we launched something called Sidekick app extensions. We worked with 18 partners who are hopefully also in this room, who helped us shape this extension point. Since we launched, and just a reminder, we only launched about 6 weeks ago, there's already been half a million conversations where merchants include some action from those 18 app partners. And today, we already have over 160 apps integrated into Sidekick. If you are building an app, now is the time to start planning how will Sidekick work with it. Fun fact, last dot dev, uh I gave a talk and I did an impromptu AMA cuz I saw a lot of you were interested in talking about Sidekick. And it was actually in that room that I saw how much hunger there was to build a feature like this. And so we decided to prioritize it. So what we do together in the next 2 days matter. They help us shape and have an opinion on what we want to go next. Merchants rely on the apps that you all build to run their businesses effectively, and so it's a very obvious that Sidekick wasn't complete without it. Speaking of apps, last year we gave

Sidekick the ability to generate custom apps. Basically, Sidekick could generate simple front-end applications using Polaris, meta objects, or GraphQL APIs, and we kind of launched it quietly. But since then, we've seen merchants generate thousands and thousands of applications, ranging from a restocking report to warranty management. Merchants were clearly trying to use Sidekick to generate these tiny applets for themselves to fill the gaps that our platform wasn't filling. And at first, this surprised us a little. We actually didn't talk about this feature very much, and so Sidekick just offered it up, and merchants really just discovered it through conversations. But actually, this isn't surprising at all, and I bring it up as my last topic because I think it is something important. I often say this to teams, "Merchants are as unique as the people behind them." We have seen this time and time again. Every business strives to build something unique in the world. That's why entrepreneurs begin something new and novel that customers haven't seen and customers can connect with. And it makes sense that they want their software to work in their unique way.

So I purposely left this to the end because I think that invites us to have a conversation in the next couple days. How will code generation and AI change the economics of this ecosystem? And what do we need to do together so that we are in this room next year saying, "I'm glad I was at dot dev because we talked about this. How and what we build for merchants will likely change in the coming year. Code will likely hold less value. But, that doesn't mean there aren't still huge opportunities. In fact, I think there will be more. And when I think about what continues to be valuable even as code becomes more democratized, I think about data. What data do you have that actually might help merchants get more sales and that's unique to you? Taste. If you're an agency, do you have a specific angle or taste or insight that helps you kind of get ahead of cultural trends that you can lean into? And distribution. Do you have relationships, reach, trust with a group or merchant base that is unique to you? These are the things that are likely to endure even as the economics of code change in the next 2 years. If you want a sounding board on all of this, that's why we are here. That's why we are in this room. I will also say that I think that this room is actually very lucky in all of this. Lucky because our customers are actually entrepreneurs. And every time there's a shift in the labor market, there are always more entrepreneurs born. So, this is a good thing. We'll have more customers to build for, more users to build value. And we also are lucky because a lot of you in the room are entrepreneurs. And entrepreneurs always come out out of years like 2026 way stronger. This room has such a deep concentration and deep understanding of commerce. And the good thing is that physical commerce isn't going away. People still need things to live their lives.

I'm so excited in the next 2 days to spend a lot of time with all of you. We have a huge number of team and Shopify folks who are so excited to have these conversations. Let's go build the future of commerce together. With that, I'm happy to open the floor. Welcome to dot dev, guys.