Shopify President Says Agents Will Act as Personal Shoppers

Shopify’s president says the company is making a significant push towards agentic shopping.

Speaking at the Upfront Summit in LA, Harley Finkelstein argued that agentic artificial intelligence (AI) can serve as a new entry point for eCommerce merchants.

“We’re going to begin to use these agentic applications as these kinds of personal shoppers,” said Finkelstein, whose comments Monday (March 16) were reported by TechCrunch, adding that the initial rollout will take time.

As the report notes, agentic personal shoppers have been touted as the next evolution in shopping, able to more effectively find, compare and purchase products for customers.

Finklestein argued that agents will bring context to shopping in a way traditional search engines cannot. He used the example of shopping for athletic shoes.

“Agentic is fundamentally merit-based as opposed to, if you go to a search engine, you type sneakers, you’re going to see Foot Locker,” he said.

But once an agentic shopper figured out that Finkelstein prefers running shoes from the brand On, the agent will do a better job presenting options from that company the next time he looks for shoes, rather than options sold by the likes of Foot Locker.

Finkelstein also touched on his company’s effort to create an AI assistant for merchants called Sidekick, saying he thinks agentic shopping will be another component on the retail machine.

“We’re probably more excited about this particular new era of commerce than we have ever been because we think it’s just going to create so much opportunity,” he said, “not just for the large merchants, but for the long tail of merchants.”

As PYMNTS wrote last month, the rise of agentic commerce is notable because, unlike past disruptions, this one is coming from retail’s “center of gravity,” as shown by Walmart’s eCommerce partnership with Google’s Gemini app.

This “signaled more than experimentation,” and “suggested that the world’s largest retailer is coming to view agent-mediated checkout as something inevitable,” PYMNTS wrote.

Similar partnerships, like Target’s collaboration with OpenAI, have highlighted how quickly the agentic model is being legitimized, Mladen Vladic, head of product, payment networks at FIS, said in an interview last month.

“This is a transformational inflection point in the industry,” he told PYMNTS. “Not only in this country, but globally.”

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