Shopify

Forget riding the agentic commerce wave—Ottawa-based ecommerce platform Shopify wants to power it. “Commerce is moving from search to conversation,” says president Harley Finkelstein, referring to chatbot-enabled shopping. “That's a fundamental shift.” According to the company—a SaaS platform that lets merchants build ecommerce storefronts and manage payments, logistics, and operations—AI-driven orders have increased 15-fold since January 2025, thanks to expanded integrations with Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT that offer, say, a link to buy an espresso machine in a conversation about lattes versus cappuccinos. In 2025, Shopify, which supports more than 14% of U.S. ecommerce, reported $11.56 billion in revenue, up 30% from 2024. In January, the company announced the Universal Commerce Protocol, enabling AI agents to handle all steps from search to checkout and allowing millions of merchants across more than 175 countries to sell directly through AI agents. Finkelstein says this faster, more personalized process will unlock a new wave of digital entrepreneurship. “With AI, the speed to scale compresses,” he says. “Empires will be built in years—maybe even months—not decades.”