You're probably already using AI for something in your business—writing product descriptions, brainstorming subject lines, drafting social posts. Sometimes the output is great. Sometimes it's generic enough that you're rewriting half of it anyway. The difference usually comes down to how much the tool knows about your business.
That gap gets wider when the stakes get higher. The questions that actually move your business—which products to restock, why conversion dropped last week, who to target with your next campaign—need answers grounded in your data: your sales, inventory, customer behavior, order patterns. Most AI workflows aren't connected to your admin, and copying sensitive business data into tools that weren't built to protect it isn't a great tradeoff. You're left applying general advice to your specific situation.
Sidekick works differently. It's built directly into Shopify's admin with access to your store's real-time data. You ask a question in plain language and get an answer based on what's actually happening in your business. You don't always need to know the exact steps either. Sidekick breaks complex problems into manageable tasks, then helps you execute: generating content, building automations, creating reports, and taking action right in your admin.
You stay in control. Every team member can freely ask questions and experiment without breaking anything, leaking data, or accessing things outside their scope—Sidekick has the same access as the logged-in user and doesn't expand permissions beyond what your store admin has set. It checks with you before making any changes, and nothing goes live without your explicit say-so. Store data is never used to train foundation models or shared with other merchants.
Brands are already catching on. In the first three weeks following the Winter '26 Edition release, Shopify merchants used Sidekick to create 19.8 million product descriptions, nearly 30,000 automations, almost 4,000 custom apps, and over 28,000 emails.
These used to be hour-long projects. Now they're 30-second conversations. Below are five questions every ecommerce team needs answered and what happens when you ask them using Sidekick.
What's selling and what's not?
When you ask "What products should I promote this month?" and your workflow isn't connected to your store's data, you might get advice like: "Consider promoting seasonal items, bestsellers, or products with high margins. Analyze your sales data to identify trends." You still have to go find that data yourself.
When AI can use the data already in your admin (your sales, inventory, and orders) you can ask:
Prompt: Show me yesterday's total sales compared to the same day last week. Include the number of orders and average order value.
Sidekick can help you uncover day-over-day sales comparison with real numbers, order count and AOV trends, and immediate visibility into what's moving.
Any time I have a question about what is selling, what's not selling—my first place I turn is Sidekick. It'll give you a quick answer, but then it backs it up with an actual report.
No copying and pasting. No exporting to spreadsheets. Just answers that use your store's own data in the place you already work.
Where are we losing money?
When your workflow isn't connected to the data in your admin, you might get suggestions like: "Common revenue loss areas include low-margin products, slow-moving inventory, and pricing gaps. Review your data to identify specific issues." But you're still on your own to find the actual problem.
When AI can use your store's own data, including the metrics and behavior data already in your Shopify admin, then you can ask pointed questions like:
Prompt: Show current inventory value, slow‑moving stock, and near‑term cash needs. Recommend three actions (liquidate, bundle, reorder) that improve cash coverage in the next 30 days and link to execute.
Sidekick can help you understand which products are eating into profit, which slow movers are tying up capital, and where to prioritize pricing, bundling, or liquidation decisions.
By connecting directly to your store's own data, the AI can surface previously unseen opportunities, so you can act on what matters most.
What would have taken us at least a day to collect in raw data and analyze—Sidekick turned it around in less than a minute with the same answer and outcome.
Who are my best customers?
When your workflow isn't connected to your store's data, you might get segmentation theory about RFM analysis, customer lifetime value formulas, general frameworks—but not *your* actual numbers or segments.
When AI can use the data already in your admin, including your store's sales and customer behavior, you can ask:
Prompt: Segment my customers from the last 90 days by purchase behavior: new vs returning, order value tiers, and purchase frequency. Show revenue contribution by segment.
Instead of a generic segmentation framework, Sidekick can break down your actual customer base and show you where the value is concentrated and where you have room to grow. Want to build a retention campaign? You see exactly which customers to target and why, based on how they've actually behaved in your store. All of that uses the data you already have in your admin.
What should we do next?
When your workflow isn't connected to your store's data, you might get: "To increase revenue, consider running promotions, improving product pages, or expanding to new channels. Test different strategies to see what works." You then have to translate that into actions using your own data.
When AI can use the data already in your admin, including your sales trends, traffic, and performance metrics, you can ask:
Prompt: Analyze my sales trends over the last 90 days and give me 3-5 priority actions to take this month based on what's actually moving in my store.
Sidekick can surface specific recommendations based on your trends, prioritized by impact, with the data to back each one up.
It gets better too. Sidekick Pulse can proactively surface these insights, so you don't have to ask.
Pulse proactively researches your store and generates personalized recommendations based on your store's data. Each recommendation includes a digest of actionable tasks to help improve your store, for example:
- Prioritize Medium size restocks to capture missed sales (with the specific products and data)
- Convert your 5,865 social sessions into sales with shoppable content (with conversion rate comparison)
- Improve mobile cart-to-checkout rate (with the specific drop-off point)
A bestselling size about to go out of stock. A traffic source converting at a fraction of what it should. A checkout step quietly losing mobile customers. These are the kinds of signals that typically require an analyst to catch, and Pulse can surface them automatically, so your team can act before the opportunity passes.
Can we build this?
In many workflows, AI helps with the draft, then you copy, paste, and upload. You might draft emails in one place, then format and schedule elsewhere. Apps and automations get suggested in one tool and built in another. The opportunity is when that work happens inside your platform, using the data and systems you already have there, so you're not bridging the gap yourself.
When AI is built into your platform and can use what's already in your admin—your products, orders, and settings—you can describe what you need in plain language:
Prompt: Create an event app that generates discounted checkout links and QR codes for selected products.
You can also describe a storefront change or an automation:
Prompt: Create a full-width banner section visible only to customers who are not logged in, announcing 10% off to new customers.
Prompt: Build a workflow that checks inventory levels daily for my top 20 products. If any drop below 10 units, send me an email alert with the product name and current stock level.
What makes Sidekick different
Sidekick is designed to fit your workflow:
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Built for commerce: Sidekick understands how the Shopify platform works. It knows how settings interact, what the APIs can do, and what merchants commonly run into. Merchants can trust what it tells them, and act on it with confidence.
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Grounded in your data: Every answer pulls from the data you already have in your Shopify admin—sales, orders, inventory, traffic—used in context where you work. No copying and pasting between tools, no sharing your store data with third parties.
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Takes action: Sidekick can build automations, create apps, and update your store directly, so the work gets done where you already operate.
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Proactive insights: Sidekick Pulse surfaces opportunities before you ask. It proactively researches your store and generates personalized recommendations, including a digest of actionable tasks to help improve your store.
- Always improving: Shopify constantly evaluates new AI models and optimizes for commerce use cases. You benefit from that infrastructure without building it yourself.
Where to start: a framework for your AI strategy
The best prompts come from your own workflow—and the framework works for any team, no matter where you are with AI. Take five minutes and jot down:
- Challenges you're facing right now: What's unclear, broken, or taking too long?
- Questions you haven't been able to answer: What would you ask if you had a data analyst or ops person on call?
- Work that's been in your backlog: Reports you never run, segments you never built, copy you never got to.
- Tasks that eat your time: The repetitive stuff you do every week or every launch.
Turn those into prompts. Ask in plain language, "What's my cart abandonment rate this month by traffic source?" or "Which products should I restock before the holiday?" The more your question ties to the data and actions already in your admin, the more useful the answer.
For example, if "weekly reporting takes half a day" is on your list, your first prompt might be: "Summarize last week's sales, top products, and conversion rate—and highlight anything that changed vs. the prior week." You can refine from there.
Ready to try it? Sidekick is included in all Shopify plans. If you're already on Shopify, open your admin and start asking questions today. If you're not on Shopify yet, see how Shopify's AI can work for your business.
