Shopify is pushing forward with agents and AI

Expectations around agentic commerce adoption have tempered as many wait to see how much agentic adoption truly happens.

Shopify is pushing ahead: AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores grew eightfold YoY in Q1, according to Harley Finkelstein, Shopify president, on the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call earlier this month.

The backstory: OpenAI made headlines in September when it announced Instant Checkout, an agentic checkout option inside ChatGPT, with Shopify merchants able to participate. Flash-forward several months later, and “about a dozen” Shopify merchants were using agentic commerce technology due to limited access from agentic applications, Finkelstein said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in March. (According to the company’s website, it counts “millions of merchants” overall.)

And while users can still buy from Shopify stores through its ChatGPT agentic storefront, OpenAI has recently “scaled back” its plans for Instant Checkout, per The Information.

• Shopify has continued to lean into agentic commerce and AI. During its earnings call, execs touted engagement from AI-driven traffic and the company’s agentic and AI investments.
• Internally, “AI has become an exoskeleton for everyone at Shopify,” Finkelstein told investors and analysts during the call.

Stuck in traffic? Shopify stores have seen substantial traffic from AI sources, Finkelstein said. As that traffic has grown, so have conversions from it.

• The number of orders that have come from AI-driven searches increased nearly 13x in the quarter, according to the company.
• Shopify stores can be integrated with not only ChatGPT, but also Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini.

“Traffic from catalog-powered AI searches converts 2x more than traffic from general AI searches, where the agent is working from scraped or often outdated information from across the web.” That’s in part due to Shopify updating its catalog data with real-time pricing for products and inventory information, he said on the call.

Searching for something: Shopify is also infusing AI into other parts of its business. The number of shops using Sidekick—an AI-powered personal assistant designed to assist merchants—weekly grew four times over YoY in Q1, Finkelstein said.

• While e-commerce makes up “sub-20%” of total US retail, Finkelstein said, orders from first-time buyers are coming to the platform “from AI searches…at nearly twice the rate of traditional organic search,” he said.

Big picture: Shopify reported revenue of $3.2 billion in the quarter, up 34%, while gross merchant value, which encompasses the “total sales dollar value of goods sold over a specific period,” was $101 billion in the quarter. Expected revenue growth is in the “high 20s” YoY for Q2, Shopify CFO Jeff Hoffmeister said on the call.