Harley Finkelstein

We're almost living in sort of a post-world channel where consumers bounce from a TikTok video to an AI agent to a website to a store.

Even in video games like Roblox where Shopify powers commerce.

The brands that really won the weekend made the experience feel the same everywhere they were.

And that continues today.

Yeah, I mean, look, it's still very, very early, but since January, we've actually seen AI-driven traffic on to Shopify stores up about 6X.

But we've been preparing for this for years.

We've been laying the rails for a Gentic.

We've already announced deals with Perplexity and more recently with ChatGBT, where brands on Shopify can sell directly in those conversations.

No links, no redirects, just sort of this very seamless experience directly in the chat.

And so I think we're going to see a lot more of that.

Now, what permutation eventually wins?

We're not sure yet, but we'll be ready for it.

But the other side of it is really interesting, which is that brands, the merchants themselves are using AI to support them on the biggest shopping season weekend of the year.

So we have something called Sidekick, which is the AI assistant built into Shopify, which knows everything about merchant stores, knows everything about Shopify.

And we've seen over 100 million conversations with Sidekick.

So merchants are able to do things like

design, copyright, market, create these incredible analytics dashboards where they can decide where to spend in a much more sophisticated way.

And so it's giving smaller merchants a real leg up against the bigger guys because this AI empowers them.

We actually measure both consumer confidence, but also consumers' appetite to spend at checkout.

And so far, I mean, as we speak right now, Ed, $2.5 million are going through checkout every single minute.