Shopify announced substantial growth in AI-powered commerce during Monday’s third-quarter earnings call: traffic from AI tools jumped seven times since January, while orders from AI-based search increased eleven-fold over the same period. The e-commerce giant shared these figures alongside revenue of $2.84 billion, up 32% year-over-year, though shares dipped 3% in pre-market trading after slightly missing operating income expectations.

AI Partnerships Create New Commerce Channel

President Harley Finkelstein positioned artificial intelligence as “the biggest shift in technology since the internet” during the earnings call, highlighting Shopify’s integrations with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot as key drivers of what the company calls “agentic commerce.” This emerging model allows AI agents to search, compare, and facilitate purchases on behalf of shoppers within conversational interfaces.

The company’s September partnership with OpenAI enabled US ChatGPT users to shop directly from Etsy sellers within chat conversations, with over one million Shopify merchants gaining similar access soon. “We’ve been building and investing in this infrastructure to make it really easy to embed shopping into every AI conversation,” Finkelstein said. A recent Shopify survey found 64% of consumers expect to use AI in some form during their holiday shopping.

Internal AI Tools Show Promising Results

Beyond external partnerships, Shopify’s internal AI assistant Sidekick has generated nearly 100 million merchant interactions since launch, including 8 million in October alone. More than 750,000 merchants used the tool for the first time in the third quarter. The company also employs Scout—an AI tool helping employees analyze merchant feedback and support tickets to accelerate product development decisions.

The AI surge comes amid Shopify’s gross merchandise volume growing 32% year-over-year to $92 billion, with the company projecting revenue growth in the mid-to-high twenties range for the fourth quarter. Despite strong fundamentals, analysts noted operating expenses rose 25.5% due to AI development investments and increased marketing spending.