Shopify doubles down on AI

Shopify is pushing artificial intelligence deeper into the software merchants use every day, from its admin assistant to new tools that test storefront changes before launch. (shopify.com) In Shopify’s Winter ’26 Edition, published December 10, 2025, the company said it shipped more than 150 product updates and described Sidekick, its in-admin assistant first unveiled in Summer 2023, as moving from “minor usage” to an “essential part of the platform.” (shopify.com, shopify.com) That rollout now includes merchant-facing features with agent-like behavior. Shopify said Sidekick can proactively surface growth ideas through Sidekick Pulse, build automations, edit themes and emails, and generate custom apps inside the admin using Shopify developer tools. (shopify.com) The company is also building AI into how merchants prepare site changes. SimGym, launched on December 8, 2025 and still labeled an “AI Research Preview,” uses AI shoppers to browse a store, compare themes, and estimate effects on add-to-cart behavior before a redesign goes live. (apps.shopify.com, help.shopify.com) Shopify’s AI push reaches beyond merchant dashboards and into the channels where products get discovered. In a separate December 10, 2025 announcement, Shopify said its Agentic Storefronts product lets merchants syndicate catalog data to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot through a single setup in Shopify admin. (shopify.com) Under the hood, Shopify has been building its own tooling for machine learning work. In a December 5, 2025 engineering post, the company open-sourced Tangle, an experimentation platform it said was built to help teams share pipelines, reproduce results, and cut repeated compute work across Shopify’s search and discovery systems. (shopify.engineering) The names circulating around Shopify’s internal roadmap point to a broader pattern: merchant tools on the surface, developer and research infrastructure underneath. Tangle is documented publicly; SimGym is live in preview; and investor commentary this week framed those efforts as part of a larger AI buildout rather than a one-off feature cycle. (shopify.engineering, apps.shopify.com, finance.yahoo.com) That reading has started to show up in market analysis. A Yahoo Finance item published April 23, 2026, citing Nightview Capital’s first-quarter investor letter, said Shopify’s AI capabilities could deliver greater value by improving merchant productivity and strengthening the platform’s position inside commerce workflows. (finance.yahoo.com) The practical bet is that merchants will use fewer separate tools if Shopify can handle writing, analysis, automation, app generation, and even simulated user testing in one place. Shopify’s recent product releases show the company trying to make that case across the admin, the storefront, and the developer stack at the same time. (shopify.com, shopify.com, help.shopify.com)