Shopify helps merchants win with Sidekick, a multimodal AI assistant powered by the Live API

Shopify is the leading global commerce platform, providing the essential infrastructure needed to start, scale, and market a retail business of any size. In an ongoing effort to improve the experience for its merchants, the Shopify team wanted to offer a personalized, in-depth assistant to help millions of businesses start and scale across more than 175 countries.

To achieve this they developed Sidekick, an AI assistant designed to partner with merchants on everything from design to analytics. By integrating voice and video processing through the Live API, Sidekick is an interactive, capable commerce assistant that can help in real-time, often during merchants’ most challenging periods.

The Shopify team wanted Sidekick to seamlessly connect commerce knowledge to a merchant’s unique needs. In voice mode, Sidekick can help merchants navigate the Shopify admin, search shop resources, pull analytics on their store performance, and other actions via tools. It can even help troubleshoot issues outside of the admin through the screen sharing feature.

By pairing complex reasoning with voice-powered interactions, Sidekick provides robust support away from a desk—critical for merchants that are often on the go, meeting in a warehouse, or working with their hands.

The Sidekick team used Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio and the Live API to process audio and output realistic-sounding speech with low latency. Conversations had to feel responsive, as disruptions in conversational flow could ruin the user experience and dissuade use. The team adjusted cues, tone, and turn-taking—when the bot should interrupt and how eager it should be to speak—to make interactions feel more natural.

These voice and video capabilities helped counter the expectation of a simple chatbot, avoiding the pitfalls of many AI assistants. “Users often forget they’re talking to AI within a minute of using Sidekick, and in some cases have thanked the bot after a long chat,” said David Wurtz, VP of Product.

Making an AI assistant that felt capable and conversational was an iterative task. The Shopify team went from prototyping with Gemini models in Google AI Studio to testing the feature with real users on Vertex AI in just three weeks.

From marketing to operations, the team is always looking to help merchants scale their business with their integrated platform. Wurtz says, “This is an exciting time to be an entrepreneur. New AI capabilities like those offered through Gemini empower our merchants to win.”