Shopify On Monday, the company announced a series of AI-focused updates, including AI Chatbot “Sidekick” An early version of Sidekick was launched today. Sidekick is designed to provide merchants with a support chatbot that can help them create discount codes, generate store reports, or suggest blog post ideas, among other things.
While this sounds like a pretty run-of-the-mill AI chatbot feature, if Shopify continues to tailor the chatbot’s functionality to merchants’ needs, it seems like it could become a useful way to get help or support.
Vanessa Lee, Shopify's vice president of product, said in an interview that while Sidekick is already available in thousands of Shopify stores, it is currently limited to merchants with English-language stores in North America. But if you want to try Sidekick, you can sign up for a waiting list on the official website. Lee said the company hopes Sidekick will be promoted in other languages and regions as well.
In addition to Sidekick, Shopify also made other AI-focused announcements. For example, AI-based product classification can save merchants a lot of time. As you build your product listing, Shopify's technology can automatically suggest the right taxonomy for that product to make your listing more discoverable.
Additionally, Shopify has launched another AI tool that provides suggested responses for customer chats that come in through the Shopify Inbox. Currently, these responses are just suggestions, and merchants must finalize and actually send the responses. Lee said Shopify is open to the possibility of letting customers chat with AI chatbots that speak on behalf of merchants, but so far the company has chosen to keep humans involved until they are very confident that there will be no problems.