Shopify’s AI ‘Sidekick’ chatbot for merchants is now in early access

Shopify’s new AI “Sidekick” chatbot is officially launching in early access, the company said as part of its “2024 Summer Edition” updates announced on Monday.

Sidekick, which the company first revealed last year, functions as a support chatbot for merchants, helping them do things like make discount codes, generate reports about your store, or suggest blog post ideas. Sure, it sounds like pretty typical AI chatbot stuff, but it seems like it could be a useful way to get help or assistance, especially if Shopify continues to tailor the chatbot to fit merchant needs.

Sidekick is live across thousands of Shopify stores, but it’s currently limited to merchants who have English stores in North America, Vanessa Lee, Shopify’s vice president of product, says in an interview with The Verge. If you don’t have Sidekick and want to try it, you can sign up for the waitlist. And the company wants to make it available in other languages and other locales, Lee says.

Shopify is making a handful of other AI-focused announcements, too. One, AI-powered product categorization, seems like it could actually save merchants a lot of time. As you’re building a product listing, Shopify’s tech can automatically suggest the taxonomy about the product — taxonomy that’s used to make listings more easily discoverable — that might fit that product so that you don’t have to type it in yourself. If Shopify’s suggestions aren’t right, you can manually change things.

Another AI tool will offer suggested replies for customer chats that come in through Shopify Inbox. Right now, these replies are just suggestions, meaning merchants will have to be the ones to finalize and actually send a response. Lee says Shopify is open to the possibility of letting customers chat with an AI chatbot that speaks on behalf of the merchant, but for now, the company has chosen to keep the human in the loop “until we’re uber confident that nothing would happen.”

Shopify is also bringing its AI-powered image generator, which launched in January, to its iOS and Android apps and letting merchants use it in more places in their Shopify admin. The company says Shopify merchants have saved more than 1 million AI-generated images in six months.