Shopify is the latest addition to the list of tech giants embracing generative AI. The e-commerce company announced the expansion of its AI capabilities under the Shopify Magic brand during the bi-annual Editions conference.
Shopify Magic can now provide merchants' customers with answers tailored to their conversation history and store policies. It can generate content for blog posts, product descriptions, and marketing emails. Through a new AI tool called Sidekick, Shopify can interpret prompts related to business decision-making.
Miqdad Jaffer, Shopify's Head of Product for AI, emphasized the company's commitment to keeping businesses on the cutting edge of technology. The latest Shopify Magic features are powered by a mix of proprietary Shopify data and large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's ChatGPT. This combination ensures that data and conversations aren't shared with third parties.
Leveraging these resources, Shopify Magic can generate blog posts for events, business milestones, and campaign ideas, with the ability to customize the tone and translate content into different languages. Furthermore, Magic can create customer email content from prompts just a few words long, crafting newsletters, announcements, and more.
Despite LLMs' tendency to produce untrue, biased, or toxic content, Shopify ensures merchants have the opportunity to review Magic-generated content before it goes live. Additionally, Shopify's AI features are not allowed to write or make changes to any Shopify production systems.
The highlight of Shopify's announcements is Sidekick, a conversational AI assistant trained to comprehend all of Shopify. Sidekick can understand questions related to setting up holiday sales discounts, segmenting customers for better engagement, and summarizing sales information. Additionally, it can perform tasks like product research, report creation, and website design modification.
Shopify's co-founder and CEO, Tobi Lütke, shared a demo video showcasing Sidekick's capabilities. As per Jaffer, Sidekick is essentially an e-commerce-tuned version of ChatGPT, designed to benefit people building and growing their own businesses. With tools like Sidekick, Shopify continues to evolve to better meet the needs of its merchants.
