Shopify has announced major upgrades to its AI-powered assistant, Sidekick, offering smarter, more intuitive support for entrepreneurs.
With new features like multi-step reasoning and integrated image generation, the update is set to make a meaningful impact for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) juggling growth, admin, and customer experience.
For SMEs, which often run lean operations, the enhancements to Sidekick could free up critical hours and improve business decisions without needing a data science or design team.
What is Sidekick?
Sidekick is Shopify’s AI-powered commerce assistant designed to help merchants, especially small and medium-sized businesses, start, run, and grow their online stores more efficiently. It’s like a smart, built-in business assistant that works within the Shopify platform to handle tasks, answer questions, and provide strategic guidance.
Powered by Shopify Magic, Sidekick is built to understand each individual store’s context and deliver personalised support across a range of tasks. It’s also part of a broader AI toolkit available to Shopify merchants, which includes:
- AI-generated customer support responses
- An image editing tool with automated background removal and replacement
- Automatic tagging and categorisation of products
Here’s what’s new:
- Sidekick now goes beyond surface-level answers. For instance, if a small retailer sees a drop in sales, Sidekick can analyse inventory trends, marketing efforts, and customer behaviour to pinpoint potential causes and suggest detailed action steps.
- It pulls data from across the store sales, inventory, customer profiles giving SMEs a more complete picture of what’s driving their business.
- With improved syntax and targeting tools, SMEs can now tailor campaigns to hyper-specific customer segments without needing external CRM tools.
- The assistant learns from every interaction, improving its relevance and value over time.
- SMEs with limited access to graphic designers can now use Sidekick to generate polished product visuals directly in the platform no extra software needed.
These updates reinforce Shopify’s commitment to “declarative commerce,” a vision where merchants simply express goals and the platform handles the heavy lifting. For time-poor small business owners, this means more focus on strategy and creativity, and less on spreadsheets or operational bottlenecks.
“While entrepreneurial momentum continues to thrive in the ANZ market, many retailers are still weighed down by repetitive tasks that hinder growth,” said Shaun Broughton, Managing Director APAC at Shopify.
“With the latest Sidekick upgrade, our goal is to give our merchants smarter, more intuitive AI tools that help them focus on building their business and strengthening customer relationships. We want to make advanced technology feel simple and accessible so every entrepreneur, no matter their technical expertise or economic situation, can move forward with confidence.”
Sidekick’s new features are now available to all Shopify merchants, and with its recent language expansion, SMEs can interact with it in any of the 20 supported languages, no manual switching required.
For small businesses trying to do more with less, Sidekick is shaping up to be less of a tool and more of a team member.
For more information, visit shopify.com/sidekick
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