Shopify to Debut AI Chatbot Merchant Assistant ‘Sidekick’

Shopify will launch an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot assistant called Sidekick.

The eCommerce company’s tool, which is “coming soon,” will be designed to help merchants with any queries relating to their stores, such as sales and order trends, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke said in a video shared in a Wednesday (July 12) tweet.

“Entrepreneurs are heroes, and every hero needs a Sidekick,” Lutke said in the tweet.

The news saw an increase in enthusiasm on Wall Street over two sessions since the release of the video, Seeking Alpha reported Thursday. Shopify shares rose 5.80% in afternoon trading Thursday, outpacing the market and pushing the stock to a new 52-week high of $70.33.

JMP analyst Andrew Boone said in the report that the new Shopify tool could once again lower the barriers to entry for entrepreneurs and provide better analytics and easier website building.

The Sidekick AI assistant will be embedded as a button on Shopify’s platform, allowing users to get assistance on tasks and answer queries without ever leaving the site, Reuters reported Wednesday. It can provide details about sales trends and help merchants update their stores on the platform.

This announcement comes at a time when many other companies, including several of Shopify’s competitors, are making use of AI assistants, the report said. Alibaba, Zoom and Databricks have done so in the months since the viral popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

In one recent example of the many uses of AI, Lily AI is leveraging the technology to optimize products by adopting a customer-centric perspective. Lily AI helps retailers think from the customers’ point of view and enhances eCommerce platforms by integrating customer-oriented search terms into product descriptions.

In another use of the technology, financial firm JPMorgan Chase is reportedly developing a novel AI system that determines “dissatisfaction data” in real time during customer service interactions using machine learning (ML) capabilities.

As PYMNTS reported in June, the goal of developing smarter, more reactive and dynamic customer service-focused chatbots is emerging as a crucial answer to the question of what AI’s right-now utility could look like for larger enterprises.