Verified
Shopify
Piloting- Commerce software
- ~7,600 employees (Dec 2025)
- AI use expected of all staff
- 50%+ of code AI-written
- No AI return reported
Shopify deploys AI by making its use a baseline expectation for every employee, a rule Tobi Lütke set in Apr 2025 that ties AI use to performance reviews and headcount requests. Staff reach Anthropic, OpenAI and Google models through an internal proxy with no token quota, and River, a Slack agent Shopify built, coauthored one in eight merged pull requests by May 2026. Shopify also runs AI for merchants, led by its Sidekick assistant, and post-trains open models to cut what that AI costs to serve.
shopify.comTheir approach to AI
- The platform
- Shopify built its own AI layer: an internal LLM proxy that every model call goes through, Aquifer for running agents, River in Slack, and Quick for internal apps, while buying coding tools such as Cursor and Claude Code (2025 to 2026).
- The models
- Shopify uses frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, asked staff in Apr 2026 to use nothing weaker than Claude Opus 4.6, runs Sidekick on Claude through Google Cloud, and post-trains open models such as Qwen and NVIDIA Nemotron for narrow Sidekick tasks.
- The reach
- River sessions touched the work of more than 7,000 Shopify people in one 30-day window reported in May 2026, against about 7,600 employees at the end of 2025, and over half of Shopify staff had built a Quick site by Jun 2026.
- The catch
- Shopify credits AI with letting it ship more without adding staff, but credits its falling operating expenses mainly to headcount discipline and has published no dollar figure for AI's return or for its internal AI spend.
Snapshot
- Employees
- ~7,600
- Dec 31, 2025, remote-first (2025 Form 10-K)
- Technology budget
- $1.54B R&D (2025)
- Up 12% from $1.37B; 13% of revenue, down from 15%; no separate technology budget disclosed
- AI/ML headcount
- Not disclosedest.
- Named teams include ML Platform, Applied ML and the Agentic Foundation Modeling Team
- Who owns AI
- Tobi Lütke, CEO
- CEO and Head of R&D; CTO Mikhail Parakhin moving to an advisory role (Oct 2026)
- Platform
- Internal LLM proxy, Aquifer and River
- Built in-house; Cursor, Claude Code and Codex bought
- Models
- Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, open-weight
- Claude Opus 4.6 set as the floor for staff (Apr 2026)
- Reach
- 7,000+ people touched by River
- One 30-day window, May 2026; over half of staff built a Quick site (Jun 2026)
- Use cases
- Coding, security, sales, support, merchant tools
- Sidekick handled about 34 million merchant conversations in Q2 2026
Key findings
Tobi Lütke told Shopify staff in a memo he published on Apr 7, 2025 that reflexive AI use is a baseline expectation, that AI use would count in performance reviews, and that teams must show why AI cannot do the work before asking for more headcount.
River, an AI agent Shopify built into its company Slack in early 2026, coauthored one in eight merged pull requests across Shopify and touched the work of more than 7,000 people in a 30-day window reported on May 28, 2026; a chart Tobi Lütke posted in Oct 2026 put River at 121,804 Slack threads in Sep 2026, up from 35,418 in Mar 2026.
Harley Finkelstein said on May 5, 2026 that AI writes well over 50% of Shopify's code and that Shopify shipped more than 300 products and features in 2025 with flat headcount, and Jeff Hoffmeister said output per employee is improving through deliberate AI use, but Shopify has put no figure on AI's return for any use case or for the firm.
Shopify puts no quota on staff AI token use and routes model calls through an internal LLM proxy; CTO Mikhail Parakhin said in Apr 2026 that staff should use nothing weaker than Claude Opus 4.6, and BetaKit reported on Oct 19, 2026 that Parakhin is moving to an advisory role with no successor named.
Shopify post-trains open models for narrow Sidekick tasks and estimated in Aug 2026 that serving its GraphQL agent would cost about $27 million a year on a frontier model against about $1 million fine-tuned; in Oct 2026 Shopify said self-hosting its post-trained models cuts serving cost 90% to 98% against frontier pricing.
Where Shopify sits
- Stage
- Piloting
Shopify has reported no business return it credits to AI, for any use case or for the firm: CFO Jeff Hoffmeister said in May 2026 that output per employee is improving through deliberate AI use without giving a figure, and in Feb 2026 he credited Shopify's falling operating expenses as a share of revenue largely to headcount discipline, naming AI alongside automation and Shopify's own project and talent systems. Shopify has reported a company-wide AI rollout with a user count: Shopify Engineering said on May 28, 2026 that River, its Slack agent, touched the work of more than 7,000 people in a 30-day window, and a chart Tobi Lütke posted on Oct 19, 2026 showed 6,273 employees in River threads in Sep 2026, against about 7,600 staff at the end of 2025. Lütke, CEO and Head of R&D, owns the AI mandate he set in Apr 2025, which places Shopify in Piloting. Shopify falls short of Scaling because it puts no figure on AI's effect in any function or for the firm, giving operating measures instead, such as AI writing well over half its code (May 2026).
How the stages are defined - Ownership
- CEO Tobi Lütke, who also heads R&D; CTO Mikhail Parakhin moving to an advisory role (Oct 2026)
- Platform
- Hybrid: Proxy, Aquifer, River and Quick built in-house; Cursor, Claude Code and Codex bought
- Models
- Anthropic, OpenAI and Google frontier models plus post-trained open models
- Hosting
- Google Cloud for most operations and for the Claude models behind Sidekick; Nebius GPUs for training; Shopify's own GPUs and CentML (NVIDIA) for open models; other frontier models through APIs behind an internal proxy
- Reach
- River touched the work of 7,000+ people in 30 days (May 2026)
How they deploy
AI use as a baseline expectation
Tobi Lütke's internal memo, which he posted publicly on Apr 7, 2025, made reflexive AI use a baseline expectation, added AI usage questions to performance and peer reviews and required teams to show why AI cannot do a job before asking for more headcount or resources. Shopify later added questions to its 360 review cycle asking managers and peers how AI native or AI reflexive a colleague is, and an engineering dashboard tracks use of Cursor, Claude Code and the LLM proxy (First Round Review, Jul 2025).
Every tool and model for everyone
Shopify lets anyone, not only technical staff, use every AI tool and model, according to First Round Review in Jul 2025. Farhan Thawar said Shopify ordered 1,500 Cursor licenses and quickly needed 1,500 more, with support and revenue teams the fastest-growing users, and that Shopify has no token quota. Mikhail Parakhin said in Apr 2026 that Shopify effectively funds unlimited tokens and asks staff not to use models weaker than Claude Opus 4.6, while adding that consuming tokens is not the goal in itself.
Build the AI layer, buy the models
Shopify's 2025 Form 10-K says Shopify does not develop its own foundational models and licenses third-party AI for merchant products and some internal operations. Shopify built the layer around those models instead: the LLM proxy, the Aquifer agent platform under River, Quick for internal apps, Scout for merchant feedback, and open-source tools such as Roast and Tangle. Jeff Hoffmeister said in Aug 2026 that Shopify uses frontier models where they matter and less expensive models where they do not, and Harley Finkelstein said Shopify moves a task to a more efficient model once it becomes repeatable.
Distill frontier work into smaller open models
Shopify's Sidekick team launches features on frontier models, then trains smaller models on production conversations scored by calibrated LLM judges, retraining daily (Aug 2026). Shopify post-trained Qwen3-32B for the Sidekick Flow agent (Apr 2026) and NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning for Sidekick's GraphQL subagent (Oct 2026), and Harley Finkelstein said in Aug 2026 that Shopify now runs a number of distilled models that are faster and cheaper on narrow tasks.
AI in the commerce product
Shopify gives merchants AI through Sidekick, its admin assistant, and connects merchant catalogs to outside AI agents through Agentic Storefronts, Shopify Catalog and the Universal Commerce Protocol it co-developed with Google (Jan 2026). Shopify said in Oct 2026 that its connectors work with nine agents, including ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Perplexity, and the agentic sales carry the same economics as an online store sale, Harley Finkelstein said in Aug 2026.
- Deployment model
- Shopify runs AI as shared internal platforms that every employee can use, with applied machine learning teams building the AI in its merchant products. Shopify engineers built the LLM proxy, Aquifer, River and Quick; River works only in public Slack channels, so any employee can read and reuse a session. Applied ML teams build Sidekick and post-train open models for it, the ML Platform team runs training on Kubernetes through SkyPilot, and business teams build their own agents, such as the Revenue Tooling team's RFP agent on LibreChat. Shopify is remote-first, and CEO Tobi Lütke, who also heads R&D, sets the adoption rules himself.
- Model providers
- Shopify works with models from OpenAI and Anthropic (Pragmatic Engineer, Jul 2025). Mikhail Parakhin said in Apr 2026 that some staff use OpenAI's GPT-5.4 at extra-high reasoning and others Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, that pull request review deserves costly models such as GPT-5.4 Pro or Gemini Deep Think, and that Liquid AI models handle low-latency search query understanding and long-context work, with Qwen probably another standard model inside Shopify. Shopify's coding tools include GitHub Copilot, adopted about a year before ChatGPT's release, Cursor, Claude Code, Codex and Pi, and Parakhin said command-line agents were growing faster than editor-based tools. For merchant products, Sidekick runs on Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5 through Google Cloud, according to Google Cloud's case study; Shopify combined fine-tuned LLaMA models with large general models for Sidekick (Jul 2025) and post-trained Qwen3-32B for the Flow agent (Apr 2026) and NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning for the GraphQL subagent (Oct 2026). Fine-tuned Qwen multimodal models classify products (Jul 2025); SimGym moved from GPT-4o, after testing GPT-5, to the open gpt-oss-120b (Feb 2026); Helix uses a GPT model to orchestrate its agents and Gemini to review screens (Sep 2026); and the Tinker app uses models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic (Mar 2026).
- Data and infrastructure
- Shopify runs most platform operations on Google Cloud, according to its 2025 Form 10-K, which also says its cloud hosting costs have risen over time, and Shopify Engineering called Google Cloud its main infrastructure provider for machine learning in Jul 2025. Sidekick's Claude models run on Google Cloud, which Shopify chose for latency, resiliency and uptime, according to Google Cloud's case study, and a Google Cloud Next session in Apr 2026 described Shopify running Claude on Vertex AI with model updates shipped within 24 hours; the same case study says Shopify uses Bigtable, BigQuery, Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine for data warehousing and model deployment. Shopify trains models on H200 GPU clusters from Nebius and uses Google Cloud L4 GPUs for development, scheduling jobs onto its own Kubernetes clusters on several clouds with SkyPilot (Jan 2026). Shopify serves its post-trained open models on its own GPUs and through CentML, now part of NVIDIA, which serves the Flow agent and ran SimGym on 48 dedicated B200 GPUs (Feb 2026). Other frontier models are reached through APIs behind the internal LLM proxy. Quick runs on Google Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL and BigQuery behind Identity-Aware Proxy, so every site is visible only to Shopify staff.
Platforms and internal tools
LLM proxyBy Jul 2025
Shopify's internal LLM proxy is a single access point through which staff and production systems reach a wide range of models, with new releases added as they ship, plus a collection of MCP servers and shared agents. Shopify uses the proxy for privacy and token tracking (The Pragmatic Engineer, Jul 2025) and for scaling, tracking and failover in production (First Round Review, Jul 2025), and Harley Finkelstein said in Aug 2026 that everything Shopify does with models runs through it.
- Models
- Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and others
River and AquiferEarly 2026
River is an AI agent in Shopify's company Slack that reads code, runs tests, opens pull requests, queries the data warehouse and inspects production traces when an employee mentions it in a public channel. River runs as one profile on Aquifer, Shopify's internal platform for agents, which separates the agent loop from disposable code sandboxes and adds a credentials proxy, a gateway and an event log; a pull request reviewer runs as another profile.
- Users
- Work of 7,000+ people touched in one 30-day window (May 2026)
QuickJul 2025
Quick is Shopify's internal hosting platform: staff upload a folder of HTML and get a site only Shopify employees can see, with built-in calls to models through the AI proxy, a database, file storage and data warehouse access. Quick hosted more than 50,000 sites by Jun 2026 and runs on a single virtual machine that costs $200 a month.
- Users
- Over half of Shopify employees have built a site (Jun 2026)
ScoutBy Nov 2025
Scout is Shopify's internal voice-of-the-customer system, indexing hundreds of millions of merchant feedback items so product managers, designers and engineers can ask questions and get grounded answers, Harley Finkelstein said in Nov 2025.
RoastJun 2025
Roast is an open-source framework from Shopify's Augmented Engineering Developer Experience team for structured AI workflows that mix model steps with ordinary code; Shopify uses it to grade and fix test files, add type annotations, watch Slack for early signs of incidents and research the history of puzzling code.
- Models
- Claude Code for its coding agent; OpenAI, or other models through OpenRouter, for model steps
Tangle and TangentTangle open-sourced Dec 2025
Tangle is Shopify's open-source machine learning experimentation platform, built by Search & Discovery, which caches pipeline results so a 10-hour pipeline reruns in about 20 minutes when one component changes. Tangent, which Mikhail Parakhin described on Latent Space in Apr 2026, runs automated research loops on top of Tangle to tune search, themes, prompt compression and storage.
Sidekick2023
Sidekick is Shopify's AI assistant inside the merchant admin, which analyzes store data, writes content, builds custom apps and Shopify Flow automations, and since Oct 2026 can write code, search the internet and remember what a merchant teaches it, asking for approval before it changes a store.
- Users
- About 34 million merchant conversations in Q2 2026
- Models
- Anthropic Claude Sonnet on Google Cloud, plus fine-tuned LLaMA, Qwen and NVIDIA Nemotron models
Agentic Storefronts and Shopify CatalogDec 2025
Agentic Storefronts let a merchant set up once in the Shopify admin and sell inside AI agents, with Shopify Catalog supplying structured product data and purchases completed through Shopify checkout. Shopify named ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity at launch, announced selling in Google AI Mode and Gemini through the Universal Commerce Protocol in Jan 2026, and said select brands were selling there by Mar 2026.
SimGymBy Feb 2026
SimGym is a Shopify app that tests storefront changes with AI shoppers that each have a persona, a budget and a shopping intent, and can run up to 400,000 simulated shopping sessions a day in cloud browsers (Feb 2026).
- Models
- gpt-oss-120b on NVIDIA B200 GPUs through CentML
HelixBy Sep 2026
Helix is Shopify's internal toolkit for having AI agents migrate screens of the Shopify mobile app from React Native to native Swift and Kotlin, one small checkpoint at a time, with each checkpoint passing behavior tests, a visual review, two adversarial code reviews and an engineer's approval. The Shopify app has more than 300 screens to migrate (Sep 2026).
- Models
- A GPT model as orchestrator; Gemini for visual review
Vendors and partners
Google Cloud
Cloud for most platform operations; host of the Claude models behind Sidekick; co-developer of the Universal Commerce Protocol; Gemini selling channel · Shopify's 2025 Form 10-K says Shopify uses Google Cloud for most platform operations; Google Cloud's case study says Sidekick runs Claude on Google Cloud, and a Google Cloud Next session on Apr 22, 2026 covered Shopify running Claude on Vertex AI. Shopify and Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol on Jan 11, 2026.
AnthropicBy Jul 2025
Claude Sonnet powering Sidekick; Claude models through the LLM proxy and Claude Code for staff · Anthropic's and Google Cloud's case studies say Sidekick uses Claude Sonnet 4.5 on Google Cloud and that Shopify staff build internal tools with Claude Code. Mikhail Parakhin said in Apr 2026 that Claude Opus 4.6 is the minimum model Shopify asks staff to use, and Claude is one of the agents Shopify's merchant connectors work with (Oct 2026).
OpenAIBy Jul 2025
Models through the LLM proxy, Codex for engineers, and ChatGPT as a selling channel · The Pragmatic Engineer reported in Jul 2025 that Shopify works with OpenAI and Anthropic models, and Shopify and OpenAI announced in-chat shopping in ChatGPT on Sep 29, 2025.
Anysphere (Cursor)
AI code editor licensed across engineering, support and revenue teams · Farhan Thawar said Shopify ordered 1,500 Cursor licenses and then 1,500 more (Jul 2025); Daniel Beauchamp wrote in Oct 2025 that Shopify licenses Cursor in the thousands.
GitHub (Microsoft)2021
GitHub Copilot coding assistant · Shopify used Copilot about a year before ChatGPT's release and reached 80% engineer adoption quickly, Farhan Thawar told First Round Review.
NVIDIA (CentML)
Inference serving for open models; Nemotron model and Megatron training software · CentML, now part of NVIDIA, serves Shopify's fine-tuned Flow agent and ran SimGym on B200 GPUs; Shopify presented its post-training work at NVIDIA GTC Berlin 2026.
Nebius
GPU cloud for model training · Nebius supplies H200 GPU clusters with InfiniBand for Shopify's distributed training (Jan 2026).
Toloka
Training data and expert annotation · Toloka annotators review Sidekick conversations that automated critics cannot fix (Aug 2026).
Liquid AI
Small models for low-latency search and batch catalog work · Mikhail Parakhin said in Apr 2026 that a Liquid AI model of about 300 million parameters handles query understanding in about 30 milliseconds.
Leadership
AI, data and platform leaders
Executives
Board
AI org map
CEO-set AI mandate; shared AI platforms built by engineering; applied ML inside the merchant product teams
Shopify has no chief AI officer. CEO Tobi Lütke, who also heads R&D, sets the rules for AI use himself, and CTO Mikhail Parakhin, appointed in Aug 2024 to oversee engineering and data, led the technical program until BetaKit reported on Oct 19, 2026 that he is moving to an advisory role. Engineering, under VP and Head of Engineering Farhan Thawar (title confirmed Apr 2026), builds the shared AI platforms that every employee uses, while applied ML teams build Sidekick and the other AI in the merchant product.
Shopify does not publish a count of its AI and machine learning staff. Shopify's engineering blog names the teams that build its AI: ML Platform, which runs training infrastructure; Applied ML, which builds Sidekick; the Agentic Foundation Modeling Team, which fine-tunes models for Sidekick; Search & Discovery; the Augmented Engineering Developer Experience team, which built Roast; and Application Security, which runs AI vulnerability scanning. Andrew McNamara, VP of Machine Learning, leads Sidekick. Shopify had about 7,600 employees at Dec 31, 2025, and The Pragmatic Engineer reported in Jul 2025 that Shopify was hiring 1,000 interns.
Reporting lines
CEO and Head of R&D
Finance
Jeff Hoffmeister, CFO
Operations
Jessica Hertz, COO
CTO office: engineering and data
Mikhail Parakhin, CTO
Remit from the Aug 2024 announcement; reporting line not published; Parakhin moving to an advisory role (Oct 2026), successor not named
Engineering
Farhan Thawar, VP and Head of Engineering
Title as of Apr 2026; reporting line inferred, not published
Internal AI platforms and developer tooling
LLM proxy, Aquifer, River and Quick; team names and leader not published; line inferred
ML Platform
Training on Nebius and Google Cloud through SkyPilot; line inferred
Application Security
Runs the Dispatch AI vulnerability scanning harness; line inferred
Applied ML and Sidekick
Andrew McNamara, VP of Machine Learning
Includes the Agentic Foundation Modeling Team; line inferred, not published
Product
Vanessa Lee, VP of Product
Merchant AI products such as Sidekick and Agentic Storefronts; line inferred, not published
Shopify does not publish an org chart or a management team list; its board page, checked Nov 1, 2026, names only directors. Shopify's Apr 2026 Form 10-K/A names Tobi Lütke, Harley Finkelstein, Jessica Hertz, Jeff Hoffmeister and General Counsel Jean Niehaus as executive officers and lists no CTO among them. The lines below the CEO are inferred from the Aug 2024 CTO announcement and engineering blog bylines.
Where the AI workforce sits
Engineering, ML platform and applied ML teams
Shopify does not publish AI or engineering headcount; research and development expense, mostly employee costs, was $1.54 billion in 2025, and CFO Jeff Hoffmeister said most internal AI spend sits there (Aug 2026).
Not disclosedEvery other function using shared AI tools
Support and revenue were the fastest-growing Cursor users in 2025, sales and revenue tooling teams build their own agents, and over half of Shopify employees had built a Quick site by Jun 2026.
Not disclosed
Named people
Use cases
Shopify runs AI in engineering, security, sales, support and internal tooling, and in merchant products such as Sidekick, Agentic Storefronts, SimGym, search and fraud models. Shopify has published no business-level return for any named use case; its figures are adoption counts, task speedups, merchant outcomes and the cost of serving AI. For AI as a whole, Shopify gives no dollar figure: CFO Jeff Hoffmeister credits AI with letting Shopify ship more with flat headcount, and said in May 2026 that output per employee is improving through deliberate AI use.
| Use case | Area | Status | ROI |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI coding agents and editors Shopify engineers use Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot and internal agents, and Harley Finkelstein said in May 2026 that AI writes well over 50% of Shopify's code. | Engineering | In production | |
| River, the Slack coding agent River reads code, runs tests, opens pull requests, queries the data warehouse and inspects production traces from public Slack threads; it coauthored one in eight merged pull requests in May 2026, and Shopify reported in Oct 2026 that River's share of merged mobile pull requests had risen from 6% to 61%. | Engineering | In production | |
| Vulnerability remediation with River River checks each open vulnerability against live code, opens fixes as draft pull requests and hands owners a single question; the open dependency backlog fell about 70% in the first 11 days of the workflow (Sep 2026). | Security | In production | |
| AI vulnerability scanning (Dispatch) Shopify's Application Security team runs frontier models through Dispatch, a harness that hunts for flaws and checks each finding with a different model; Dispatch scanned more than 80 applications and produced more than 300 findings in about six weeks (Jul 2026). | Security | In production | |
| Autoresearch loops for build and test speed Shopify engineers run AI agents in loops that test changes against a target metric and keep only what improves it; Shopify said the approach improved more than 40 internal metrics, including a 65% faster build on the Polaris team (Apr 2026). | Engineering | In production | |
| Roast workflows for tests and code research Roast workflows grade and fix unit tests across thousands of test files, add type annotations and explain the history behind puzzling code. | Engineering | In production | |
| Native mobile app rebuild with AI agents Shopify is moving its mobile apps from React Native back to native code because AI agents cut the cost of building for iOS and Android separately; the Shop app was rebuilt natively with AI help in 12 weeks, and Helix agents are migrating the Shopify app's more than 300 screens (Sep 2026). | Engineering | In production | |
| Quick internal apps Employees in every function build dashboards, prototypes and tools as Quick sites that call models through the AI proxy, with more than 50,000 sites created by Jun 2026. | Firmwide | In production | |
| AI-drafted weekly project updates An AI agent drafts each project's weekly update from GitHub, documents and Slack for project champions to challenge and revise, and about half go out unmodified (Jul 2025). | Firmwide | In production | |
| Scout merchant feedback search Scout indexes hundreds of millions of merchant feedback items so anyone at Shopify can ask questions and get grounded answers when writing specs and setting priorities (Nov 2025). | Product | In production | |
| RFP response agent Shopify's Revenue Tooling team built an agent on LibreChat that answers several RFP questions at once from public documentation, help docs and case studies, citing its sources and scoring its certainty (Jul 2025). | Sales | In production | |
| AI handling of routine merchant support Harley Finkelstein said in Feb 2025 that AI can now handle simple support requests such as domain configuration and password issues, so Shopify's support staff can spend their time on harder merchant conversations. | Support | In production | |
| Sidekick Sidekick answers merchants' questions about their data, builds custom apps and Flow automations, and proposes actions through its Pulse feature; it handled about 34 million conversations in Q2 2026, when merchants built more than 36,000 custom apps with it. | Merchant products | In production | |
| Fine-tuned models inside Sidekick Shopify replaced frontier models in parts of Sidekick with post-trained open models: Qwen3-32B for the Flow automation agent, served by CentML (Apr 2026), and NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning for the GraphQL subagent that answers merchants' questions about their store data (Oct 2026). | Merchant products | In production | |
| Agentic Storefronts, Catalog and UCP Shopify syndicates merchant products to ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Mode, Gemini and other agents; Harley Finkelstein said AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores both tripled year on year in Q2 2026, from a small base. | Merchant products | In production | |
| SimGym shopper simulation SimGym lets merchants test theme and layout changes on AI shoppers before real traffic sees them, with capacity for up to 400,000 simulated sessions a day (Feb 2026). | Merchant products | In production | |
| Product search and recommendations Shopify serves search and recommendations from fine-tuned Nomic embeddings of its product catalog (Jul 2025) and a generative recommender trained on buyer event sequences across storefronts and the Shop app, which raised Shop orders 0.94% relative in an online A/B test (Feb 2026). | Search and discovery | In production | |
| Product classification and enrichment Fine-tuned Qwen multimodal models classify and enrich the metadata of every product uploaded to Shopify, at hundreds of millions of inferences a day (Jul 2025). | Catalog | In production | |
| Fraud risk and merchant GMV forecasting Fast risk models assess every transaction for fraud, and a tabular transformer model forecasts merchant gross merchandise volume (Jul 2025). | Risk | In production | |
| Tinker creative app Tinker is a free mobile app with more than 100 AI tools for product shots, logos and video, built on models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and others (Mar 2026). | Consumer apps | In production | |
| Magic Mirror in-store display Magic Mirror is an experimental in-store mirror with a hidden camera and a vision model, called through Shopify's internal proxy; its first version matched blush shades for Rare Beauty shoppers (Mar 2026). | Retail | Pilot |
Adoption
Shopify's AI adoption started with GitHub Copilot about a year before ChatGPT's release, which reached 80% of engineers quickly, and widened in 2025 when Tobi Lütke's memo made AI use an expectation for everyone; Shopify bought 3,000 Cursor licenses by Jul 2025, with support and revenue teams the fastest-growing users. Mikhail Parakhin said use of AI tools took off around Dec 2025 as models improved, with command-line agents outgrowing editor-based tools, and in his Apr 2026 Latent Space interview the host read a Shopify slide as showing merged pull requests growing about 30% a month, up from about 10%. River's monthly Slack threads rose from 35,418 in Mar 2026 to 121,804 in Sep 2026, when 6,273 employees appeared in its threads, according to Tobi Lütke's chart as reported by Dealroom; Shopify has not published a weekly-use rate for AI across its staff.
By the numbers
Rollout, first pilot to today
2021
Shopify began using GitHub Copilot about a year before ChatGPT's release, and engineer adoption reached 80% quickly, Farhan Thawar told First Round Review.
Aug 2023
Shopify Engineering described how it streams responses from Sidekick, an LLM chatbot for merchants that calls tools and outside data.
Aug 2024
Shopify named former Microsoft executive Mikhail Parakhin CTO to oversee engineering and data and push its machine learning and AI work.
Dec 2024
Shopify rolled Sidekick out widely to all merchants, TechCrunch reported in May 2025.
Feb 2025
Harley Finkelstein said AI can now handle routine merchant support requests such as domain configuration and password issues, leaving support staff the harder conversations.
Apr 2025
Tobi Lütke published his memo making reflexive AI use a baseline expectation at Shopify, counted in performance reviews and headcount requests.
Jul 2025
First Round Review reported that Shopify had procured 3,000 Cursor licenses, set no quota on AI tokens and added AI questions to its 360 reviews.
Sep 2025
Shopify and OpenAI announced that Shopify merchants would sell directly inside ChatGPT conversations.
Dec 2025
Use of AI tools across Shopify took off around Dec 2025 as models improved, Mikhail Parakhin said in Apr 2026.
Early 2026
Shopify launched River, an AI agent in its company Slack built on the Aquifer agent platform.
Apr 2026
Mikhail Parakhin said Shopify effectively funds unlimited tokens and asks staff to use nothing weaker than Claude Opus 4.6.
May 2026
Harley Finkelstein said AI writes well over 50% of Shopify's code, and Shopify Engineering reported that River coauthors one in eight merged pull requests.
Jun 2026
Shopify reported more than 50,000 Quick sites, with over half of its employees having built at least one.
Sep 2026
River handled 121,804 Slack threads in the month, up from 35,418 in Mar 2026, with 6,273 Shopify employees appearing in its threads.
Economics & controls
Spend and ROI
Technology and R&D spend
Shopify does not disclose a technology budget. Shopify's research and development expense was $1.54 billion in 2025, up 12% from $1.37 billion, and fell to 13% of revenue from 15%; the increase came from $105 million more in employee costs and $61 million more in computer hardware and software, according to the 2025 Form 10-K. Shopify's revenue was $11.6 billion in 2025, up 30%, and cloud and infrastructure costs added $83 million to the cost of subscription solutions.
What AI itself costs
Shopify has not disclosed its AI spending. Jeff Hoffmeister said in Aug 2026 that most internal AI spend sits in research and development and that most of the cost of merchants' Sidekick use sits in subscription solutions, whose gross margin held just under 80% as Sidekick usage grew; in Nov 2025 he cited higher AI usage among the reasons that margin dipped, and in May 2026 he said rising LLM costs from merchants' use of AI products partly offset support efficiencies. Farhan Thawar argued in Jul 2025 that an extra $1,000 a month per engineer is cheap for a 10% productivity gain. Shopify estimated in Aug 2026 that serving Sidekick's GraphQL agent would cost about $27 million a year on a frontier model against about $1 million fine-tuned, and said in Oct 2026 that self-hosting its post-trained models cuts serving cost 90% to 98% against frontier pricing.
Reported ROI
Shopify has published no dollar return for AI. Jeff Hoffmeister said in Feb 2026 that AI, automation and Shopify's own project and talent systems let it speed up product development without growing the team, and in May 2026 that output per employee is improving through deliberate AI use, without giving a figure for either. Shopify's operating expenses fell from 45% of revenue in Q3 2023 to 37% in Q3 2025 and 34% in Q2 2026, but Hoffmeister credits that improvement mainly to headcount discipline and does not separate AI's share.
Headcount
Shopify had about 8,100 employees at the end of 2024 and about 7,600 at Dec 31, 2025, according to its Form 10-K filings. Jeff Hoffmeister said in May 2026 that Shopify has held to headcount discipline for three years and does not see that changing, and Harley Finkelstein tied the more than 300 products and features Shopify shipped in 2025 with flat headcount to AI. Tobi Lütke's Apr 2025 memo requires teams to show why AI cannot do the work before they ask for more people. The Logic reported on May 4, 2026 that Shopify cut at least 30 people in operations and customer support in Apr 2026; Shopify's spokesperson described a reorganization and did not cite AI.
Governance and risk
One proxy for model calls
Shopify routes model access through its internal LLM proxy, which handles privacy and token tracking (The Pragmatic Engineer, Jul 2025) and scaling and failover (First Round Review, Jul 2025), and Harley Finkelstein said in Aug 2026 that everything Shopify does with models runs through the proxy for visibility, control and security. Quick sites call models without holding API keys, because the keys sit on the server and requests pass through the proxy.
Agents work in public and in sandboxes
River works only in public Slack channels, with no direct messages, so every transcript is open to other Shopify employees. Shopify's Aquifer platform keeps River's agent loop separate from disposable code sandboxes, injects credentials through a proxy and applies a sandbox policy per agent profile (May 2026). River opens security fixes as draft pull requests, and code owners keep approval and merge authority (Sep 2026).
Merchants approve what Sidekick does
Shopify's rebuilt Sidekick asks merchants to approve its changes, and the store facts that Shopify drafts for outside AI agents, such as return windows, reach no agent without merchant sign-off (Oct 2026). Shopify tests Sidekick changes against production conversations scored by LLM judges calibrated to human experts and replays them through a merchant simulator before release (Aug 2025).
AI use in performance reviews
Shopify counts AI use in performance reviews under Tobi Lütke's Apr 2025 memo, asks managers and peers in 360 reviews how AI native a colleague is, and found a positive correlation between AI tool use and engineering impact (First Round Review, Jul 2025). Mikhail Parakhin said in Apr 2026 that raw token consumption is not what matters, pointing instead to the split of spending between generating code and reviewing it with costly models.
Disclosed risks and regulation
Shopify's 2025 Form 10-K says Shopify relies on third-party models it does not develop, and lists risks that AI algorithms may be flawed or biased, that rights in AI output are unsettled, and that failing to build AI into the platform could weaken it against competitors. Shopify published principles on AI regulation in Jun 2026, arguing for risk-based rules by use case, safe harbors for good-faith developers and deployers, and open standards such as the Universal Commerce Protocol.
Security testing with AI
Shopify's Application Security team scans its own applications with frontier models through Dispatch, checking each finding with a different model from the one that found it; full scans cost $50 to $300 and incremental scans $5 to $50 (Jul 2026).
Recent signals
Oct 28, 2026
Shopify's Fall '26 Edition rebuilt Sidekick to write code, search the internet and remember what merchants teach it, and said Shopify's merchant connectors work with nine AI agents, including ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity.
Oct 22, 2026
Shopify Engineering said River's share of merged mobile pull requests rose from 6% to 61% after Shopify gave its agents a fleet of remote Macs for building and testing mobile apps.
Oct 21, 2026
Shopify said a post-trained NVIDIA Nemotron model now runs Sidekick's GraphQL subagent at about 90% lower serving cost than a frontier model, and that self-hosting its post-trained models cuts serving cost 90% to 98%.
Oct 19, 2026
BetaKit reported that CTO Mikhail Parakhin is leaving the role after just over two years to become an advisor to Shopify, with no successor named.
Oct 19, 2026
Tobi Lütke posted a chart showing River handled 121,804 Slack threads in Sep 2026, up from 35,418 in Mar 2026, with 6,273 employees in its threads.
Sep 10, 2026
Shopify said it is moving its mobile apps from React Native back to native code because AI agents cut the cost of building for two platforms, after rebuilding the Shop app natively with AI help in 12 weeks.
Sep 2, 2026
Shopify Engineering said River cut the open dependency vulnerability backlog by about 70% in the first 11 days of a remediation workflow in which code owners keep approval and merge authority.
Aug 5, 2026
Shopify reported about 34 million Sidekick conversations in Q2 2026, said AI-driven traffic and orders to its merchants tripled year on year, and said most internal AI spend sits in research and development.
Jul 29, 2026
Shopify's Application Security team said its Dispatch harness scanned more than 80 applications with frontier models and produced more than 300 findings in about six weeks.
Jun 1, 2026
Shopify published its principles on AI regulation and said Sidekick had handled hundreds of millions of conversations, with usage up 4x year on year.
May 28, 2026
Shopify Engineering reported that River coauthors one in eight merged pull requests across Shopify and touched the work of more than 7,000 people in a 30-day window.
May 5, 2026
Harley Finkelstein said AI writes well over 50% of Shopify's code, and Jeff Hoffmeister said output per employee is improving through deliberate AI use.
Apr 22, 2026
A Google Cloud Next session covered how Shopify powers Sidekick with Anthropic's Claude on Google Cloud's Vertex AI, shipping model updates within 24 hours.
Apr 22, 2026
Mikhail Parakhin told Latent Space that Shopify effectively funds unlimited tokens, asks staff to use nothing weaker than Claude Opus 4.6, and saw AI tool use take off around Dec 2025.
Feb 11, 2026
Reporting 2025 results, Jeff Hoffmeister credited AI, automation and Shopify's own project and talent systems with speeding up product development without growing the team.
Quick answers
- How does Shopify deploy AI?
- Shopify deploys AI by making its use a baseline expectation for every employee, a rule Tobi Lütke set in Apr 2025 that ties AI use to performance reviews and headcount requests. Staff reach Anthropic, OpenAI and Google models through an internal proxy with no token quota, and River, a Slack agent Shopify built, coauthored one in eight merged pull requests by May 2026. Shopify also runs AI for merchants, led by its Sidekick assistant, and post-trains open models to cut what that AI costs to serve.
- What does Shopify use AI for?
- Shopify runs AI in engineering, security, sales, support and internal tooling, and in merchant products such as Sidekick, Agentic Storefronts, SimGym, search and fraud models. Shopify has published no business-level return for any named use case; its figures are adoption counts, task speedups, merchant outcomes and the cost of serving AI. For AI as a whole, Shopify gives no dollar figure: CFO Jeff Hoffmeister credits AI with letting Shopify ship more with flat headcount, and said in May 2026 that output per employee is improving through deliberate AI use.
- Who leads AI at Shopify?
- AI at Shopify is led by Mikhail Parakhin (Chief Technology Officer, moving to an advisory role); Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Engineering); Andrew McNamara (VP of Machine Learning; leads Sidekick). Ownership of AI on the org chart: CEO Tobi Lütke, who also heads R&D; CTO Mikhail Parakhin moving to an advisory role (Oct 2026).
- What AI platform does Shopify use?
- Shopify built its own AI layer: an internal LLM proxy that every model call goes through, Aquifer for running agents, River in Slack, and Quick for internal apps, while buying coding tools such as Cursor and Claude Code (2025 to 2026).
- Which AI models does Shopify use?
- Shopify uses frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, asked staff in Apr 2026 to use nothing weaker than Claude Opus 4.6, runs Sidekick on Claude through Google Cloud, and post-trains open models such as Qwen and NVIDIA Nemotron for narrow Sidekick tasks.
- How many Shopify employees use AI?
- River sessions touched the work of more than 7,000 Shopify people in one 30-day window reported in May 2026, against about 7,600 employees at the end of 2025, and over half of Shopify staff had built a Quick site by Jun 2026.
- How far has AI spread at Shopify?
- Shopify has reported no business return it credits to AI, for any use case or for the firm: CFO Jeff Hoffmeister said in May 2026 that output per employee is improving through deliberate AI use without giving a figure, and in Feb 2026 he credited Shopify's falling operating expenses as a share of revenue largely to headcount discipline, naming AI alongside automation and Shopify's own project and talent systems. Shopify has reported a company-wide AI rollout with a user count: Shopify Engineering said on May 28, 2026 that River, its Slack agent, touched the work of more than 7,000 people in a 30-day window, and a chart Tobi Lütke posted on Oct 19, 2026 showed 6,273 employees in River threads in Sep 2026, against about 7,600 staff at the end of 2025. Lütke, CEO and Head of R&D, owns the AI mandate he set in Apr 2025, which places Shopify in Piloting. Shopify falls short of Scaling because it puts no figure on AI's effect in any function or for the firm, giving operating measures instead, such as AI writing well over half its code (May 2026).
Open questions
- How much does Shopify spend on AI each year across tokens, coding tool licenses and GPUs, given that it funds unlimited tokens and reports internal AI spend only inside research and development?
- Who will lead Shopify's engineering and AI work after Mikhail Parakhin moves to an advisory role, and when does his CTO role end?
- What share of Shopify employees use AI tools every week, given that the usage chart discussed in Mikhail Parakhin's Apr 2026 interview gave no readable figure and River's figures count people touched or appearing in threads?
- By how much has output per employee risen at Shopify, given that Jeff Hoffmeister credits the improvement to deliberate AI use but has given no figure, and will the Q3 2026 results due on Nov 3, 2026 put one on it?
- What business return does Shopify attribute to River, Quick, Scout and its AI coding tools, beyond adoption counts and the share of code written by AI?
- How much of the drop in operating expenses from 45% of revenue in Q3 2023 to 34% in Q2 2026 does Shopify credit to AI rather than to headcount decisions and other changes?
- Did AI cause the lower support costs that lifted subscription solutions gross margin in 2025, and how many merchant support conversations does AI now resolve?
- What return does Sidekick deliver to Shopify itself in revenue or retention, beyond merchant outcomes such as faster first orders?
- What share of Shopify's model traffic goes to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and its own post-trained open models, how much of Sidekick still runs on Claude through Google Cloud, and what data do outside providers retain?
- How does Shopify measure the share of code written by AI, and has the rise in merged pull requests changed the rate of production incidents?
- How large is agentic commerce as a share of Shopify's gross merchandise volume?
Sources
Shopify
- Board of directors (checked Nov 1, 2026)
- Shopify names Mikhail Parakhin CTO (Aug 28, 2024)
- Fidji Simo joins Shopify's board of directors (Dec 16, 2021)
- Unserious exploration: how Shopify uses AI, Daniel Beauchamp (Oct 28, 2025)
- Shopify and OpenAI bring commerce to ChatGPT (Sep 29, 2025)
- Sidekick and BFCM (Nov 5, 2025)
- Winter '26 Edition: Agentic Storefronts (Dec 10, 2025)
- Universal Commerce Protocol and AI commerce at scale (Jan 11, 2026)
- Agentic commerce momentum (Mar 24, 2026)
- Introducing Tinker (Mar 26, 2026)
- Shopify's principles on AI regulation (Jun 1, 2026)
- Fall '26 Edition (Oct 28, 2026)
Shopify Engineering
- Under the River (May 28, 2026)
- How River takes security work from a fix to merge (Sep 2, 2026)
- We gave AI agents a mobile dev environment (Oct 22, 2026)
- Helix: the internal tool powering our Shopify app's native migration (Sep 21, 2026)
- Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify (Sep 10, 2026)
- Author page: Andrew McNamara (checked Nov 1, 2026)
- Quick: ship a site in seconds (Jun 10, 2026)
- How Shopify turns open models into task experts (Oct 21, 2026)
- Sidekick's continual learning loop (Aug 5, 2026)
- Building production-ready agentic systems: lessons from Sidekick (Aug 26, 2025)
- Fine-tuning an agent for Shopify Flow (Apr 22, 2026)
- Building an agentic harness that outlasts the model (Jul 29, 2026)
- Autoresearch at Shopify (Apr 15, 2026)
- Machine learning at Shopify (Jul 4, 2025)
- SkyPilot for ML training (Jan 26, 2026)
- SimGym (Feb 27, 2026)
- Tangle (Dec 5, 2025)
- Introducing Roast (Jun 18, 2025)
- Generative recommendations (Feb 25, 2026)
- Magic Mirror (Mar 19, 2026)
- Sidekick's improved streaming (Aug 1, 2023)
Filings and investor materials
- Shopify 2025 Form 10-K (filed Feb 11, 2026)
- Shopify 2025 Form 10-K/A, executive officers and compensation (Apr 29, 2026)
- Shopify 2024 Form 10-K (filed Feb 11, 2025)
- Form 8-K: Jessica Hertz appointed Chief Operating Officer (Oct 9, 2025)
- Shopify Q2 2026 Form 10-Q (Aug 5, 2026)
- Q4 and full-year 2025 results press release (Feb 11, 2026)
- Q2 2026 results press release (Aug 5, 2026)
- Q2 2026 earnings call transcript, The Motley Fool (Aug 5, 2026)
- Q1 2026 earnings call transcript, The Motley Fool (May 5, 2026)
- Q4 2025 earnings call transcript, The Motley Fool (Feb 11, 2026)
- Q3 2025 earnings call transcript, The Motley Fool (Nov 4, 2025)
- Q4 2024 earnings call transcript, The Motley Fool (Feb 11, 2025)
Partners
News and interviews
- The Logic: Shopify makes cuts to its operations team (May 4, 2026)
- TechCrunch: Shopify launches an AI-powered store builder (May 21, 2025)
- BetaKit: Shopify CTO Mikhail Parakhin to depart after two years (Oct 19, 2026)
- Dealroom: River threads jump to 121,804 (Oct 19, 2026)
- Latent Space: Shopify's AI phase transition, with Mikhail Parakhin (Apr 2026)
- First Round Review: How Shopify brought its AI memo to life, with Farhan Thawar (Jul 15, 2025)
- The Pragmatic Engineer: How AI is changing software engineering at Shopify (Jul 2, 2025)
- CNBC: Shopify CEO says staff must prove AI cannot do a job before asking for headcount (Apr 7, 2025)
- TechCrunch: Shopify CEO tells teams to consider AI before growing headcount (Apr 7, 2025)
Data confidence
- Confirmed
- Stated in a primary or reputable public source.
- Estimated
- Derived or approximated from public reporting.
- Unconfirmed
- Reported, but not yet corroborated.
Shopify profile · Enterprise AI diffusion report by Imagine · facts checked against their sources on Nov 1, 2026
