Inside Shopify's Plan for Agentic Commerce and AI Shoppers | Andrew McNamara, VP of Applied ML, Shopify

In this episode, Andrew McNamara, VP of Applied ML at Shopify, returns to unpack how much has changed in agentic commerce since his last episode. Andrew and Liam dig into why agents are becoming "the new front door to commerce," why orders coming to Shopify stores from AI are up 13x, and what's actually happening inside Shopify's personalized shopping agent in the Shop app.

They also get into the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and why AI commerce is growing 9x faster than social commerce did at the same stage, how Sidekick's architecture and app extensions work, and SimGym, Shopify's system for training AI shoppers to A/B test store changes before they ever reach a real customer.

Key Topics Covered

• How shopping is shifting from stores and desktops toward agents as "the new front door to commerce"
• Why orders coming to Shopify stores from AI are up 13x, and why catalog-powered AI search converts twice as well as general AI search
• Inside Shop app's personalized shopping agent, and how it learns different shopping personas (like shopping for a pet versus a child)
• Why customers are shifting from keyword searches to natural language queries, and the higher conversion rates that come with it
• Why Shopify keeps shopping data personalized to the individual user rather than training it into a larger internal model
• What the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is, and why AI commerce is growing 9x faster than social commerce and 3x faster than mobile did at the same stage
• The story of Shopify's CEO giving his own Hermes agent a budget so it can send him gifts in the mail
• Sidekick's app extensions, and how partners like Klaviyo and Loop plugged in at launch
• Campaign Autopilot's "auto research loop," and its parallels to reinforcement learning
• SimGym, and how Shopify trains AI shoppers to A/B test store changes before running them on real customers
• Why Sidekick runs on Anthropic's Sonnet model hosted on Google Cloud, and why that choice is model agnostic
• Andrew's own habit of shopping by taking pictures throughout the week and searching by image through UCP-connected agents

Episode Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction and welcome

00:29 - What's changed in AI and shopping since their last conversation

01:47 - Agents becoming "the new front door to commerce"

04:16 - Inside Shop app's personalized shopping agent

07:32 - Why data stays personalized to each shopper instead of training a larger model

11:53 - What the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is, and orders from AI up 13x

14:58 - Merchant tooling for tracking AI-driven traffic and conversions

15:55 - The story of Tobi's Hermes agent sending him gifts in the mail

20:48 - Andrew's own habit of shopping by taking pictures and searching by image

26:59 - Sidekick's app extensions and partner integrations

33:02 - Inside Sidekick's architecture: the Sonnet model and knowledge base

35:18 - Campaign Autopilot's auto research loop

38:58 - SimGym: training AI shoppers to test store changes

42:23 - What's next for Shopify's agentic commerce features

44:17 - Where to find Andrew

Andrew's Socials:

Twitter (X) - https://x.com/DrewCH

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmcnamara1/

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