In this episode, Andrew McNamara, VP of Applied ML at Shopify, returns to unpack how much has changed in agentic commerce since his last episode. Andrew and Liam dig into why agents are becoming "the new front door to commerce," why orders coming to Shopify stores from AI are up 13x, and what's actually happening inside Shopify's personalized shopping agent in the Shop app.
They also get into the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and why AI commerce is growing 9x faster than social commerce did at the same stage, how Sidekick's architecture and app extensions work, and SimGym, Shopify's system for training AI shoppers to A/B test store changes before they ever reach a real customer.
Key Topics Covered
How shopping is shifting from stores and desktops toward agents as "the new front door to commerce"
Why orders coming to Shopify stores from AI are up 13x, and why catalog-powered AI search converts twice as well as general AI search
Inside Shop app's personalized shopping agent, and how it learns different shopping personas (like shopping for a pet versus a child)
Why customers are shifting from keyword searches to natural language queries, and the higher conversion rates that come with it
Why Shopify keeps shopping data personalized to the individual user rather than training it into a larger internal model
What the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is, and why AI commerce is growing 9x faster than social commerce and 3x faster than mobile did at the same stage
The story of Shopify's CEO giving his own Hermes agent a budget so it can send him gifts in the mail
Sidekick's app extensions, and how partners like Klaviyo and Loop plugged in at launch
Campaign Autopilot's "auto research loop," and its parallels to reinforcement learning
SimGym, and how Shopify trains AI shoppers to A/B test store changes before running them on real customers
Why Sidekick runs on Anthropic's Sonnet model hosted on Google Cloud, and why that choice is model agnostic
Andrew's own habit of shopping by taking pictures throughout the week and searching by image through UCP-connected agents
Episode Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction and welcome
00:29 - What's changed in AI and shopping since their last conversation
01:47 - Agents becoming "the new front door to commerce"
04:16 - Inside Shop app's personalized shopping agent
07:32 - Why data stays personalized to each shopper instead of training a larger model
11:53 - What the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is, and orders from AI up 13x
14:58 - Merchant tooling for tracking AI-driven traffic and conversions
15:55 - The story of Tobi's Hermes agent sending him gifts in the mail
20:48 - Andrew's own habit of shopping by taking pictures and searching by image
26:59 - Sidekick's app extensions and partner integrations
33:02 - Inside Sidekick's architecture: the Sonnet model and knowledge base
35:18 - Campaign Autopilot's auto research loop
38:58 - SimGym: training AI shoppers to test store changes
42:23 - What's next for Shopify's agentic commerce features
44:17 - Where to find Andrew
Andrew's Socials:
Twitter (X) - https://x.com/DrewCH
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmcnamara1/
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