rss-bridge 2026-01-09T08:40:00+00:00

Every ecommerce hero needs a Sidekick

Ryan is joined by Vanessa Lee, VP of Product at Shopify, to discuss how AI is a tech renaissance and how these new technologies are affecting the ecommerce world. They cover the development of Sidekick, along with the general challenges of building AI tools, the importance of maintaining human oversight in AI, and what the future holds for personalized user experiences in ecommerce.

January 9, 2026

Every ecommerce hero needs a Sidekick

We spoke with Shopify about how they’re building developer-focused AI products last May; you can check it out here.

Sidekick is Shopify’s AI assistant that combines commerce knowledge with advanced reasoning. Learn more about how Shopify is using AI agents to evolve their product taxonomy at scale on their blog.

Connect with Vanessa on Twitter.

Congrats to user Erwin Brandstetter for winning a Great Answer badge for their answer to How to convert empty to null in PostgreSQL?.

TRANSCRIPT

[Intro Music]

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Ryan Donovan: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology. I am Ryan Donovan, your host, and today we are talking about AI as a renaissance and what else is going on in the world of e-commerce. And my guest today is Vanessa Lee, VP of Product at Shopify. So, welcome to the show, Vanessa.

Vanessa Lee: Thanks for having me, Ryan.

Ryan Donovan: So, before we get into the details here, we'd like to get to know our guests. Tell us a little bit about how you got into software and technology.

Vanessa Lee: I am a robotics engineer. We call it mechatronics, for those who are really hardcore. But I did engineering in university here in Waterloo and Canada. I've always loved building things, and so it was a very natural post-secondary education for me to have. And I think from there, I did a couple startups. I think this is back in the time before startups were that cool, and so it was not that in vogue to do startups. So, I felt like a little bit of a lone wolf. But whenever I was part of a team, whether it was in school and we were building a robot, you end up picking a specialization, because in robotics, someone does the sensors, someone does the hardware, and I was always the software person. And so, I really learned how to code in C++ and some Java, because that was the language of the day with Arduinos, and Raspberry Pis, and those kind of things. And so, I came out, did my startup, in which case I was the only person coding, and then I found myself at Shopify nine years ago. And I started here as a senior PM working on our app platform. So, back then, we were really just getting started as a platform. We had some great APIs. There was actually a bargaining ecosystem of app developers already, because the opportunities were so, so vast building for entrepreneurs, but we hadn't put a lot of deliberate effort at that time to build our platform. We didn't version our APIs when I joined, which was wild. We didn't have extensions, we didn't have functions, we didn't have a lot of the stuff that we have now. And so, almost a decade later, it's amazing to see how much our platform has grown in terms of capabilities, in terms of what you can build on Shopify's developer. And then, yeah, I've expanded my role, but that's where it all started.

Ryan Donovan: Okay. So, last time we talked to the fine folks at Shopify, we had Glen Coates on as Head a Product. Obviously, you've been there for nine years, so you were immersed in the sort of philosophy of whatever Shopify thinks. How do you see this role, having newly ascended to it?

Vanessa Lee: We do so much as a company, I find. Our scope has increased from where you go to build your online store over the last decade, to where you go to get a point of sale, where you come to connect your store with agentic surfaces. We've just grown and grown and become truly the operating system of merchants' businesses. I've worked on quite a few parts of our platform, online store, and liquid. Some of the horizon updates that you chatted with Glen about I had worked with the team on quite a lot. So, it has been a fire hose over the last six months, but perhaps one that I had already, in some places, dabbled in. So, it's been, yeah, it's been a fun six months.

Ryan Donovan: Yeah. Let's get into the details today, the topics today. You think of AI as a renaissance for technology. We talk about AI pretty regularly on this program.

Vanessa Lee: I'm sure like all in 2024.

Ryan Donovan: Yeah, absolutely. And we get a healthy amount of pushback on it. We've had some skepticism, we've found in our developer survey. Basically, the more people use Ai, the more skeptical they become. How do you see AI as a renaissance in that space?

Vanessa Lee: Yeah, that's a really good question. Toby had, very early on, put forward a video, which kind of shared our ambition for Sidekick, right? It showed Sidekick being able to work on the platform to create products, to create collections, create all the primitives inside of Shopify, all the resources in Shopify, and do it, basically, with you alongside. So, you'd be able to review everything, but it's essentially able to draft a whole bunch of resources in Shopify. And that was really the start of our Sidekick journey. This was back in 2024, I believe. The last couple of years have really been an exercise of how do you build an AI agent at scale, right? Which, for those who have done it, it's not an easy feat, especially when you are starting from scratch. And so, the last couple of years we've been working a lot on Sidekick. When we came out earlier this year with a new architecture of Sidekick, we started seeing Sidekick be a lot more successful in most conversations. So, I purposely waited and held back the team from talking and shouting too much about Sidekick until I thought that it really drove some value.

Ryan Donovan: For folks who don't know, Sidekick is what?

Vanessa Lee: It's our, essentially, AI assistant. So, very similar to what a lot of platforms are doing, it lives alongside in the UI, you can ask it questions, it could create products for, can create collections for you if you're in Shopify, it can help you edit your online store. And so, it's able to help you traverse the entire platform. And so, when you're building something like that, we had to make sure that every question you threw to it, it would be relatively valuable.

Ryan Donovan: Right.

Vanessa Lee: And so, earlier this year, after we launched that architecture, we had finally seen, okay, now merchants, our users, are starting to truly demand Sidekick in more places. And so, I'd say the last seven months since then have been super fun for us. So, after building a ton of foundations over the last two years, now is the time where we get to really stretch our legs and say like, 'okay, in what places in the admin can we also deliver value using AI? And so, Renaissance just captured, I think, our approach to where we're at. We put in a lot of hard work to get to this point and to make AI something that wasn't just a great demo feature, but something that actually repeatedly would deliver value.

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