Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
*Featured in this video:* Farhan Thawar, Head of Engineering at Shopify
*Executive summary:* E-commerce platform and point-of-sale provider Shopify helps businesses of all sizes launch and grow. Their mission is to free up entrepreneurs to focus on their products and customers, with the goal of using new technology to continually empower merchants. The company moved its infrastructure to Google Cloud in 2018 to add scalability and resilience, as well as to avoid running out of network, compute, or storage during busy periods. To create the right infrastructure for what’s next for online retail — namely agentic commerce — Shopify recently added Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and built its embedded Sidekick AI-powered assistant to broadly share its knowledge base with customers. Shopify employees also use AI through Notebook LM and Workspace to save time, while engineers use the new Google Antigravity developer environment for reduced toil. As well as putting AI technology into practice, Shopify engineers co-developed the recently launched open source Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) with Google. The UCP makes it easy for brands to turn AI interactions into sales across existing retail infrastructure.
*Challenge:* In the forward-looking retail industry, every business has to stay ahead of trends and new buying patterns, especially as agentic AI matures. Shopify builds on its Google Cloud foundation to empower its millions of merchants. Shopify customers need to be able to make sales within AI-powered locations, such as search engine results, and infuse AI into their work in a straightforward, no-code way.
*Solution:* With an existing data infrastructure that uses BigQuery and Spanner, and the adoption of Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Shopify built a high-quality help center for its millions of users. The embedded Sidekick AI assistant answers merchant questions at any time in natural language, drawing from Shopify’s vast trove of help documents, accumulated commerce knowledge, and data insights to answer questions, generate content, and execute a wide range of technical, business-specific tasks independently. Sidekick can create apps and edit code, track metrics and trends and create custom reports, and stays aware of new features as they’re released, all with real-time data access. Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform offers the ability to use whatever AI model works best for each use case, such as Gemini for live voice and translation capabilities.
*Results:* During last year’s Black Friday Cyber Monday period, Shopify served 81 million customers, supporting $14.6 billion in sales, with a peak of $5.1 million per minute transacted. Their solid infrastructure and data foundation served as the bedrock to create the Sidekick AI-powered assistant for merchants to access always-on help with direct access to store data and Shopify’s accumulated commerce expertise, freeing up their time so they can focus on their products and customers. And, with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform adoption, Shopify merchants can now make sales directly on AI answer pages in Google. On the back end, Shopify’s engineering team also helped develop a new open source protocol, the UCP, a key step in agentic AI commerce maturity.
*Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Farhan Thawar, Head of Engineering at Shopify:*
→ “As the world changes and people change their buying patterns, we have to ensure that our infrastructure keeps up with their demands and their ideas. We build the infrastructure for commerce in such a way that as agentic commerce becomes popular and buyer behavior changes, it’s all possible because we’ve built the right layers of infrastructure.”
→ “The biggest and most important time of the year for most of our entrepreneurs is Black Friday, Cyber Monday, BFCM. And in partnering with Google Cloud, we were able to scale up our infrastructure without having to buy any more machines or provision more equipment.”
→ “As AI and agentic commerce become more mainstream, the best answers are going to come for those who have the best data. Sidekick is our way to bring all the power of everything we know about commerce inside of Shopify to you via this simple chat interface.”
*Google Cloud products used:* Compute Engine, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Antigravity, BigQuery, BigTable, DataFlow, Spanner, Gemini, Workspace,
*Learn more:*
→ How Shopify scales AI-powered retail to empower millions of merchants with Claude on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform cloud.google.com/customers/shopify
→ How Shopify improved consumer search intent with real-time ML cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/how-shopify-improved-consumer-search-intent-with-real-time-ml
→ Getting started with Universal Commerce Protocol on Google developers.google.com/merchant/ucp
*Featured in this video:* Farhan Thawar, Head of Engineering at Shopify
*Executive summary:* E-commerce platform and point-of-sale provider Shopify helps businesses of all sizes launch and grow. Their mission is to free up entrepreneurs to focus on their products and customers, with the goal of using new technology to continually empower merchants. The company moved its infrastructure to Google Cloud in 2018 to add scalability and resilience, as well as to avoid running out of network, compute, or storage during busy periods. To create the right infrastructure for what’s next for online retail — namely agentic commerce — Shopify recently added Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and built its embedded Sidekick AI-powered assistant to broadly share its knowledge base with customers. Shopify employees also use AI through Notebook LM and Workspace to save time, while engineers use the new Google Antigravity developer environment for reduced toil. As well as putting AI technology into practice, Shopify engineers co-developed the recently launched open source Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) with Google. The UCP makes it easy for brands to turn AI interactions into sales across existing retail infrastructure.
*Challenge:* In the forward-looking retail industry, every business has to stay ahead of trends and new buying patterns, especially as agentic AI matures. Shopify builds on its Google Cloud foundation to empower its millions of merchants. Shopify customers need to be able to make sales within AI-powered locations, such as search engine results, and infuse AI into their work in a straightforward, no-code way.
*Solution:* With an existing data infrastructure that uses BigQuery and Spanner, and the adoption of Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Shopify built a high-quality help center for its millions of users. The embedded Sidekick AI assistant answers merchant questions at any time in natural language, drawing from Shopify’s vast trove of help documents, accumulated commerce knowledge, and data insights to answer questions, generate content, and execute a wide range of technical, business-specific tasks independently. Sidekick can create apps and edit code, track metrics and trends and create custom reports, and stays aware of new features as they’re released, all with real-time data access. Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform offers the ability to use whatever AI model works best for each use case, such as Gemini for live voice and translation capabilities.
*Results:* During last year’s Black Friday Cyber Monday period, Shopify served 81 million customers, supporting $14.6 billion in sales, with a peak of $5.1 million per minute transacted. Their solid infrastructure and data foundation served as the bedrock to create the Sidekick AI-powered assistant for merchants to access always-on help with direct access to store data and Shopify’s accumulated commerce expertise, freeing up their time so they can focus on their products and customers. And, with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform adoption, Shopify merchants can now make sales directly on AI answer pages in Google. On the back end, Shopify’s engineering team also helped develop a new open source protocol, the UCP, a key step in agentic AI commerce maturity.
*Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Farhan Thawar, Head of Engineering at Shopify:*
→ “As the world changes and people change their buying patterns, we have to ensure that our infrastructure keeps up with their demands and their ideas. We build the infrastructure for commerce in such a way that as agentic commerce becomes popular and buyer behavior changes, it’s all possible because we’ve built the right layers of infrastructure.”
→ “The biggest and most important time of the year for most of our entrepreneurs is Black Friday, Cyber Monday, BFCM. And in partnering with Google Cloud, we were able to scale up our infrastructure without having to buy any more machines or provision more equipment.”
→ “As AI and agentic commerce become more mainstream, the best answers are going to come for those who have the best data. Sidekick is our way to bring all the power of everything we know about commerce inside of Shopify to you via this simple chat interface.”
*Google Cloud products used:* Compute Engine, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Antigravity, BigQuery, BigTable, DataFlow, Spanner, Gemini, Workspace,
*Learn more:*
→ How Shopify scales AI-powered retail to empower millions of merchants with Claude on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform cloud.google.com/customers/shopify
→ How Shopify improved consumer search intent with real-time ML cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/how-shopify-improved-consumer-search-intent-with-real-time-ml
→ Getting started with Universal Commerce Protocol on Google developers.google.com/merchant/ucp
