Shopify has made a slew of new artificial intelligence (AI) announcements as part of the more than 150 updates included in its Summer 2024 Edition.
The Canadian e-commerce software giant has been embedding AI across its platform and products as part of a push to help its merchants save time and boost sales, detailing some of this work in its latest biannual showcase of product and feature changes.
Leveraging AI and automation to boost efficiency is a priority for Shopify in 2024.
Following recent advances in generative AI, companies have been scrambling to apply AI to a wide variety of problems, with varying degrees of success. To date, businesses have largely seen real progress in using AI to augment rather than entirely replace certain tasks and roles, industry leaders told BetaKit in a wide-ranging update.
Leveraging AI and automation to increase efficiency has been a stated priority for Shopify in 2024, both in terms of its own operations and the tools the company provides to merchants. Among other applications, Shopify has been leveraging AI to help sellers edit images, create products, provide customer support, and navigate the firm’s platform more easily.
Earlier this year, Shopify rolled out AI image generation through its Media Editor. So far, Shopify said its merchants have used it to save more than one million AI-generated images to its stores. Today, the company has announced that it is extending AI image editing across its platform to everywhere its clients use images, and expanding this capability to mobile.
Shopify claims that it is also making it easier and faster to add new products through Magic, which will now suggest personalized, intelligent recommendations for all product categories, and automatically assign new offerings the correct attributes, such as colour, size, and style.
On the customer-support front, for merchants using Inbox, the company will suggest AI-generated responses to inbound customer chats tailored to their stores.
Meanwhile, Sidekick, Shopify’s AI-enabled commerce assistant, remains in early access for select merchants. Today, it is live in thousands of stores, and the company said it intends to continue to make Sidekick available to more clients.
Beyond AI, Shopify announced that it has also rebuilt its analytics to give its customers new ways to view, explore, and curate their data. It has also simplified selling in-person with Shopify point-of-sale (POS) through the rollout of one-tap digital receipts plus automatic detection of whether products can be returned.
Shopify has also evolved Markets, its cross-border selling solution, into a “one-stop shop for growth and expansion” that helps merchants customize buyer experiences for selling internationally, moving into business-to-business, and in-person selling via Shopify POS.
Feature image courtesy Burst.