AI-powered page builders are everywhere all of a sudden. Website providers, email marketing vendors, eCommerce engines, and others throughout the digital marketing land are realizing that AI can solve their users’ biggest pain point – writing copy. This is especially the case for SMBs, as we’ve quantified.
The latest to join the party is Shopify. It recently launched a batch of AI-powered features to help its merchants beef up their online stores in automated ways. This takes form throughout Shopify’s suite, including an AI generator for creating product images, banner ads, and other visual assets.
Besides peacemeal AI generation – likely suited to already established Shopify sites and storefronts – it also now offers a full-blown AI store builder. This automates the initial creation of an online storefront by getting it up and running from a single prompt. Merchants can then go back in and manually modify.
Agentic Territory
Elsewhere in the new batch of AI tools is LLM upgrades to Shopify’s existing Sidekick function. This is its AI chatbot that’s meant to answer open-ended questions from Shopify merchants. For example, they can ask about things like tariffs and how that might impact their business and eCommerce strategy.
Sidekick brings things into agentic territory, but in a business-facing way. Next steps could include customer-facing AI agents that help merchants automate customer support functions. This is one of AI’s areas of applicability that may take longer to gain merchant trust, given that it’s customer-facing.
In fact, we covered this topic on a webcast with Duda last week. The functional areas where AI is gaining the most traction are rote/mechanical, dreaded by merchants, and low stakes. That third one comes into play in the question of whether or not to unleash AI on customers. Many SMBs aren’t there yet.
Regardless of those hurdles and SMB trust issues with AI, Shopify’s newest batch of AI-powered features is telling of where we are in the technology’s adoption cycle. It’s being integrated across eCommerce and marketing functions – from content generation to open-ended co-pilot support.
Driver’s Seat
Another key lesson is optionality. At this stage, when small businesses are at varying levels of comfort and trust with AI, it’s best to give them a range of options or degrees to which it’s used. For example, Shopify’s new full-blown AI store builder lets SMBs have their hand on the wheel with manual override.
This was a lesson we heard at L25 from vcita’s Itzik Levy. Offering degrees of AI is a strategy that’s baked into the agentic AI functions in its BizAI tool. This alleviates trust issues held by some SMBs, as they know they’re still in the driver’s seat. At the same time it accomodates AI power users.
“It’s commendable to see Shopify making the initial setup of online stores more accessible through AI,” said Levy when we reached out for comment. “While their AI-powered store builder offers a streamlined approach to getting started, our focus at vcita with our BizAI goes beyond this initial phase. Our agentic AI is specifically designed to provide ongoing, context-aware assistance to SMBs, blending automation with essential human oversight.”
“We believe that while a smooth launch is crucial, the long-term success of SMBs depends on their ability to efficiently manage and grow their operations daily,” continued Levy. “AI should be engineered to be a true partner in this journey, supporting them in running smarter every day, not just in the initial setup. We envision AI as an ongoing collaborator that empowers businesses rather than simply serving as a tool for a one-time task.”
Header image credit: appshunter.io on Unsplash
