How Shopify Scales AI-Powered Sidekick to Millions of Merchants with Claude on Vertex AI

Shopify Source: GOOGLE CLOUD ↗January 2025

Shopify built Sidekick, an AI commerce assistant powered by Claude Sonnet on Google Vertex AI, enabling millions of merchants to reach their first sale in days instead of weeks.

Impact

< 24 hours

Model Upgrade Deployment

Days instead of weeks

Time to First Sale

Millions

Merchants Served

Challenge

Needed to support millions of merchants globally with personalized, always-available AI assistance at scale with high accuracy.

Solution

Built Sidekick AI commerce assistant powered by Claude Sonnet 4.5 on Google Vertex AI, with advanced reasoning and tool-calling for expert-level merchant guidance.

Tools & Technologies

Google Vertex AI ML Platform

Claude on Vertex AI ML Platform

Google BigQuery Data Platform

What Leaders Say

“The combination of Claude and Vertex AI helps us empower millions of merchants with our AI-enabled commerce assistant, Sidekick.”
Andrew McNamara, Director of Applied AI, Shopify

Get the full story.

Full Story

Shopify needed to support millions of merchants globally with personalized, always-available AI assistance. The platform required a large language model capable of understanding merchant needs and delivering highly accurate results at scale.

Shopify built Sidekick, an AI-enabled commerce assistant powered by Claude Sonnet (upgraded to Claude Sonnet 4.5) running on Google Cloud Vertex AI. The solution combines conversational AI with advanced reasoning and tool-calling capabilities to provide expert-level guidance on store setup, marketing strategy, and business operations.

The upgrade from Claude Sonnet 4.0 to 4.5 was deployed to production in less than 24 hours. New entrepreneurs can now reach their first sale in days instead of weeks. Merchants describe Sidekick as a lifeline for small businesses.

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