Shopify is doubling down on generative AI, much like other Big Tech brands.

The e-commerce company unveiled an expanded set of features under Shopify Magic, Shopify's catch-all brand for generative AI, at its bi-annual Editions conference.

Today and going forward, Shopify Magic can begin to answer the questions of merchants' customers based on their conversation histories and store policies; generate content for blog posts, product description, and marketing email; and, via a new chatbot-like AI tool called Sidekick, understand and interpret questions or prompts related to business decision making.

We feel a huge responsibility in keeping the businesses we power on the edge of technology, and we think that there's so much more untapped potential for AI and entrepreneurs-and we're deeply committed to making the power of AI accessible to businesses of all sizes, said Miqdad Jaffer, Shopify's head of product for AI, in an email interview with TechCrunch.

Jaffer explained Shopify Magic's new capabilities, powered by a combination of proprietary Shopify data, including merchant business data, with available large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT — architected so that the data and conversations are not shared with third parties.

With that data and those models, Shopify Magic can now create blog posts for holidays, business milestones, and campaign ideas, allowing merchants to customise tone of voice and translate the content to other languages. And, more broadly — as hinted earlier on — Magic can now create customer emails from a few words of text length, automatically drafting weekly newsletters, announcements, and more.

Given the tendency of LLMs to produce content that's not accurate-or even biased and toxic-as Jaffer emphasized, Magic is willing to provide review copy before it gets live. Additionally, he said, to safety, Shopify's AI features do never write or change Shopify production systems.
Sidekick
Perhaps the biggest news from Shopify today is Sidekick, which the company describes as a conversational AI assistant that's "trained to know and understand all of Shopify," according to Jaffer.
Sidekick will understand questions like "How do I set up a discount for a holiday sale? "and "Help me group my customers better so I can connect with them more meaningfully in marketing," as you synthesize information across sales documents and conduct regular product research.
Sidekick can be directed to do particular to-do items, such as reports showing what the merchant's best-sellers are or walking a merchant through an email campaign orchestration tutorial.

Sidekick can also modify the style of Shopify merchant shops. One of the possible magic tricks it can perform is the capability to put product collections on a home page, or offer a list of suggested themes and copy for a hero banner. A demo video posted by Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke some weeks ago shows Sidekick answering several questions by a snowsports supply merchant. But when asked why sales have declined from March through July, Sidekick responded that most likely it is due to minimal snowfall, while showing a chart of illustrating the sales volume by the month.
Then when the merchant urges him to "put everything on sale," Sidekick advises an automatic 10% discount on all merchandise in the merchant's store.

As can be seen, Sidekick is basically an e-commerce-tuned version of ChatGPT — and Jaffer said that is the point. We believe that there isn't any corner of the internet that will benefit more from AI than the pursuit of people building and growing their own businesses," Jaffer said. "Features [like Sidekick] are constantly evolving to tailor to and act on the needs of our merchants.".