Delivers personalized assistance to millions of merchants with Sidekick
Maintains conversation quality while executing multiple tool calls per interaction to get merchants the best answer
Speeds up development and iteration time for faster updates
Shopify uses Claude on Vertex AI to scale Sidekick, an AI-enabled commerce assistant, to make it easier for millions of merchants to get more done faster.
Shopify uses Claude on Vertex AI to scale Sidekick, an AI-enabled commerce assistant, to make it easier for millions of merchants to get more done faster.
Personalized always-available support for all Shopify merchants to help them succeed
Shopify supports millions of businesses globally with an all‑in‑one commerce platform that makes it easier to start, run, and grow a business—online, in store, and everywhere in between.
To support this mission, Shopify built Sidekick, an AI-enabled commerce assistant designed to help merchants of all sizes get more done, faster.
Sidekick combines conversational AI with advanced reasoning capabilities to deliver expert-level guidance for merchants. By synthesizing Shopify’s unique knowledge, context, and data, the assistant provides merchants with personalized support and insights.
A merchant can use natural language to ask Sidekick questions like, “How do I increase my conversion rate?” or “Which 3 products have the highest sales?”.
When developing Sidekick, Shopify needed a large language model capable of understanding what merchants want and delivering highly accurate results. Shopify chose Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet for its advanced reasoning and tool-calling capabilities. By running Claude on Vertex AI, Shopify achieved superior latency, resiliency, and uptime, helping keep Sidekick available when merchants need it the most.
The combination of Claude and Vertex AI helps us empower millions of merchants with our AI-enabled commerce assistant, Sidekick. There’s been a lot of merchants that we’ve talked to that say Sidekick ‘feels like a lifeline for small businesses’ and helps them ‘come out on top’.
Andrew McNamara
Director of Applied AI, Shopify
Empowering merchants with insights
With Claude Sonnet 4.5 on Vertex AI managing complex processes like reasoning in the background, Sidekick removes any type of technical barrier to entry—every merchant, regardless of technical background, can gain value from it.
Shopify’s testing and evaluation revealed Claude on Vertex AI as the best option for its specific needs thanks to high performance, reliability, and the strength of Anthropic’s partnership with Google Cloud.
Shopify also uses solutions such as Bigtable, BigQuery, Compute Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine to quickly deliver end-to-end environments for data warehousing and model deployment. As a result, developers can iterate quickly and ship new features or versions faster to support their millions of merchants. For instance, when upgrading from Claude Sonnet 4.0 to 4.5, the new model was deployed into production in less than 24 hours.
“We take availability very seriously because we never want merchants to struggle because Sidekick isn’t available for them,” says Andrew McNamara, Director of Applied AI, Shopify. “Having many different options of where the model is hosted, like Vertex AI, gives us the resiliency and uptime that we need to power Sidekick and get updates released quickly.”
Unlocking data and sales for merchants faster
Sidekick transforms how merchants operate, especially in data analysis and store setup by leveraging Anthropic and Google Cloud. Merchants can now get quick answers to complex analytical questions in natural language, leading to better, data-driven decisions and higher sales. New entrepreneurs can get to their first sale faster — instead of weeks, this sometimes happens in days. The agentic nature of Claude on Vertex AI allows it to string together multiple tool calls, such as looking up products, writing an analytics query, and then refining recommendations, without causing latency issues.
Sidekick maintains a natural cadence across conversations with merchants, even when a complex question with varying parts arises and it needs to run parallel tool calls.
Shopify also uses Claude models to create internal tools for everything from writing emails and labeling data to assessing risk. Through Model Garden on Vertex AI, Shopify developers can easily access any models they need, including Claude Haiku, Claude Sonnet, and Google’s Gemini models, to speed up development and distribution of new features for merchants. Employees can build internal tools in minutes instead of days, boosting productivity and efficiency across the organization.
Through the power of AI, Shopify gives merchants the tools that they need to get to their first sales faster.
Shopify provides essential internet infrastructure for commerce. Shopify’s all-in-one platform makes it easier to start, run, and grow a business, powering sales online, in store, and everywhere in between. Millions of businesses in 175+ countries use Shopify—from entrepreneurs to global brands.
Industry: Retail
Location: United States
Products: Claude on Vertex AI, Vertex AI, Bigtable, BigQuery, Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine
About Google Cloud partner — Anthropic
Anthropic is dedicated to building safer AI systems that people can rely on. Its Claude family of AI models offer speed and performance backed by uncompromising integrity.
