The engineering team are able to scale up their infrastructure and database machines without having to procure servers, without the concern of running out of compute or network or storage.

“We focus on people who want to start a business anywhere and buyers who can come from anywhere,” says Thawar. “The scale really is about us making sure we bring an amazing experience no matter where you might want to start your business or where you might want to buy from.”

The scale of Google Cloud helps Shopify power its data analytics and transactional database infrastructure. Spanner’s geo-partitioning feature keeps shopping cart data close to buyers globally, while maintaining a single logical table for a unified checkout experience. And moving from sharded MySQL to Spanner to manage user sessions has improved regional failover and consistency. BigQuery handles all of the company’s data analytics. The data analytics insights from BigQuery, along with Data Catalog and Spanner, have helped Shopify to build better user experiences.

This foundation set the company up well to explore how AI could benefit users, leading to the development of Sidekick, their AI-powered assistant.

“As the AI model started to improve, we started thinking about how we could partner with all the LLM providers, including Google,” says Thawar. “As Gemini became more prominent, we want to make sure these amazing experiences are possible for our buyers and merchants. We wanted to have a single help center experience that can help folks build whatever they have questions on.”

Shopify uses Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform as a multi-model platform for Sidekick, picking the right frontier model—a particular top-tier, advanced AI system that can power complex tasks—for each use case the user requires, whether that’s retrieving help documentation, writing code, or pulling reports. The Model Garden within Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform gives Shopify access to a broad range of leading models—including Google's Gemini, which powers experiences like live voice and translation—while running everything on a single, reliable platform.

“Entrepreneurship is lonely, even if you have employees,” says Thawar. “It’s you against the world trying to bring something to life. Shopify Sidekick is really our effort to give you a co-founder to help you along your entrepreneurial journey.”

The Sidekick assistant can support merchants from initial decision-making through execution of actions, since it has full business context for each user. Sidekick users can ask questions in plain language or initiate actions, like changing store design elements or building workflows. Sidekick offers 24/7 coverage for customers with questions who don’t want to wait for a live agent. It’s a way for Shopify to more easily and quickly disseminate their valuable documentation and other useful tips for users.

“We want to make sure that if one person knows the answer to something or if we've already got a help document about how to solve a particular problem, that that can reach all of the millions of businesses that are on Shopify,” says Thawar.

Sidekick is trained on Shopify’s data and commerce expertise, rather than general knowledge, so it’s able to deliver business-specific assistance and recommendations, such as creating a report with last week’s fastest-growing products, for example. Sidekick becomes aware of new features as they’re released, and includes real-time access to store data without data exports or integrations. It also generates content and can execute no-code technical tasks for users.

And Sidekick is global: the Shopify team is prototyping AI translation using Gemini.

“That means having buyers and merchants using different languages, but still speaking the language of commerce,” says Thawar. “It allows us to give an amazing experience even if the native language is not English.”

Shopify is also using Workspace’s AI features to reduce manual tasks for employees, as well as NotebookLM so employees can collect project information in one place. Another internal AI initiative focuses on removing more toil from the engineering workflow by building directly on Google’s new Antigravity integrated development environment. It combines chat, agentic, and UI experiences to help reduce manual and repetitive tasks from developers’ daily work.

As retail technology adapts quickly to new agentic opportunities, Shopify plans to continue to prioritize prototyping when creating new offerings to empower its customers.

“We always want to see a high-fidelity version of a possible experience,” says Thawar. “Because we work with Google Cloud, a lot of those experiences can be deployed in a way that we can test with real users.”