Shopify to Roll Out AI Assistant for Merchants

Canada’s eCommerce giant Shopify will soon roll out “Sidekick” — a new artificial intelligence (AI) assistant designed to help the platform’s merchants.  

According to a video posted on Twitter by Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, the new tool will appear as a button located at the top right of a user’s Shopify account.

I've got something very exciting to announce:

Entrepreneurs are heroes, and every hero needs a Sidekick ✨ pic.twitter.com/6u3HAPH92b

— tobi lutke (@tobi) July 12, 2023

Once clicked, a sidebar containing a chat box will appear, and merchants can ask the chatbot to help them take things off their to-do list, create discounts, analyze sales, edit shop themes, and more.  

In one of the examples used in the video, the user asked Sidekick to “put everything on sale.” The AI chatbot responded with options to name the sale, determine the type of sale, place the discount percentage, and choose which products the sale will apply to.  

“We believe entrepreneurs are heroes, this is our foundational belief here, and every hero needs a Sidekick,” shared Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke.  

Shopify is the latest eCommerce giant to incorporate AI into their services.  

Last June, Chinese conglomerate Alibaba began integrating its own large language model (LLM), Tongyi Qianwen, into its meeting assistant service, Tongyi Tingwu. With the help of generative AI, the upgraded service helps users share and summarize audio and video content.  

More recently, Alibaba Cloud unveiled Tongyi Wanxiang, its AI image generator.  

According to Alibaba Cloud Intelligence CTO Jingren Zhou, the service will facilitate the “development of innovative AI art and creative expressions for businesses across a wide range of sectors, including eCommerce, gaming, design, and advertising.”