Enterprise commerce teams are under pressure to make higher-stakes decisions faster, scale output without scaling headcount, and ship campaigns in days instead of weeks. AI isn't a strategy exercise for the teams doing this well. It's a practical tool running inside their store, answering questions in seconds, building workflows without developer tickets, and generating content at catalog scale.
Sidekick is Shopify's AI assistant, built directly into your admin, connected to your store's real-time data, and capable of taking action in the platform. Because it understands how the Shopify platform works—how settings interact, what the APIs can do, and what merchants commonly run into—it doesn't just answer questions. It executes.
It's built for your team. Sidekick lives inside your admin, so it works the way your team already does. No exporting data, no syncing across tools, no copy-pasting into a separate interface. It automatically selects the right AI model for each task and breaks complex problems into manageable steps, so your team can focus on decisions, not execution.
You're in control. Every team member can freely ask questions and experiment without breaking anything, leaking data, or accessing things outside their scope—Sidekick respects the same permissions as the logged-in user. It checks with you before making any changes, and nothing goes live without your explicit say-so. Store data is never used to train foundation models or shared with other merchants.
Here are just some of the ways enterprise teams are using Sidekick today:
- Analyzing cross-channel performance trends and getting executive-ready insights in seconds
- Running margin analysis, inventory velocity checks, and operational modeling on live data
- Diagnosing funnel drop-offs, return rate drivers, and conversion issues
- Segmenting customers by behavior, value, and purchase patterns
- Building custom apps—dashboards, trackers, operational tools
- Creating automations for inventory alerts, order routing, discount logic, and more
- Generating and A/B testing ad copy, email campaigns, and product descriptions at scale
- Optimizing product pages for SEO and AI discovery
- Surfacing proactive, data-cited recommendations through Sidekick Pulse
And that's just scratching the surface. This article breaks down how enterprise teams are putting each of these capabilities to work, with real prompts and examples.
Analysis: Complex questions, immediate answers
Answering the questions that drive enterprise decisions—cross-channel performance, margin analysis, customer segmentation—typically requires analyst time, data exports, spreadsheet work, and interpretation. That creates bottlenecks at exactly the moments when speed matters most.
With Sidekick, enterprise teams can get instant multi-dimensional analysis, backed by their actual store data.
Performance trends
Prompt: Pull performance data from this time last year. Show: best-selling products, top-performing campaigns, worst ROAS by channel, customer acquisition costs, and refund rates. Highlight what worked and what didn't.
Prompt: 90-day growth snapshot vs last year with 3 executive bets to pursue.
In practice: When the Princess Polly team wanted to build their 2025 BFCM strategy, they used Sidekick to analyze their 2024 Black Friday Cyber Monday performance—pulling product-level insights, identifying top performers, and generating tailored recommendations to grow sales volume and increase AOV. Instead of hours of report compilation, the analysis took minutes and surfaced specific signals like which products outperformed 3x and where the biggest growth opportunities were for the next season.
Gap analysis
Prompt: Conduct a detailed funnel analysis identifying drop-off points across our customer journey. Specify: product pages with highest abandonment, checkout failures, mobile vs desktop performance, and which traffic sources have the worst conversion. Provide specific page URLs and quantified drop-off percentages.
In practice: A digital product team knew their return rate was dragging down net sales but couldn't pinpoint the source. They used Sidekick to identify exactly which products were driving returns, then leveraged the recommendations to improve product detail pages—adding better fit information, sizing guidance, and material details to address the root causes.
Individual results may vary.
Operational improvements
Prompt: Analyze inventory turnover rates and gross margins for all products with >$10k in sales this month. Identify products with high velocity but low margins, and low velocity but high margins.
Prompt: Calculate holding costs for slow-moving inventory and propose liquidation bundles or sales to recover capital. Provide expected margin and cash impact by action.
Customer insights
Prompt: Analyze multi-item purchase behavior from the last year to uncover bundling trends and missed cross-sell opportunities. Identify the most frequently bundled products, highlight top combinations by frequency and revenue, and recommend 3–5 product pairings or bundle offers to increase basket size.
In practice: A site merchandising team at a major cosmetics brand used Sidekick to identify products frequently purchased together. They created bundle products from those insights, then re-targeted existing customers with reminders to repurchase as bundles when it was time to restock.
Executive planning
Prompt: Act as my Shopify operator. Create a weekly business digest for last week. Summarize what changed, what drove the change, and give me the first three actions to take with links to do them now.
In practice: An SVP of Operations used Sidekick to evaluate expansion markets for their next retail store. By pulling regional sales data, customer density, and performance trends, they built a data-backed case to present to leadership.
Building: Ship operational tools without developer backlogs
Enterprise operations require custom workflows, specialized apps, and automation that off-the-shelf solutions don't provide. Building these typically means dev tickets, agency contracts, or waiting in a backlog. Sidekick changes that equation. Describe what you need, and it builds it. No technical background required.
Describe an app or workflow the same way you'd describe it to a colleague. Sidekick builds it with triggers, conditions, and actions. You review the logic, test it, then activate. Nothing goes live without your review.
Custom apps
Prompt: Create a customer tier app that displays top customers by order count.
- Display 'Customer Milestones' as page heading with three summary cards in a horizontal row: gold tier count (gold/warning badge), silver tier count (neutral badge), bronze tier count (info badge)
- Three sections with dividers, each with heading and tier badge: 'Gold Tier' (100+ orders, warning), 'Silver Tier' (25-99 orders, neutral), 'Bronze Tier' (10-24 orders, info)
- Each section top: tier description 'X customers with Y+ orders', secondary 'Tag All as [Tier]' button, secondary 'Export List' button
- 3-column grid of customer cards: colorful avatar with initials, name as heading, email, order count with cart icon, total spent with cash icon, divider, bottom row with primary 'Add Discount' button and secondary 'Tag' button
- 'Tag All' click: add tier tag (Gold/Silver/Bronze Customer) to all in tier, show success banner
- Individual 'Tag' click: modal with text field pre-filled '[Tier] Customer', 'Cancel' and 'Apply Tag' buttons
- 'Add Discount' click: modal with auto-generated code, discount value (percentage/fixed radio buttons), date pickers for validity, 'Cancel' and 'Create Discount' buttons
- Query customers with order counts, filter by tiers (>=100, 25-99, 10-24), create customer-specific price rules for discounts
Prompt: Create a reorder recommendation app that calculates optimal order quantities based on sales velocity.
- Display a banner at top containing three stats in a compact horizontal row: at-risk items count, estimated lost sales value, and total units to reorder
- Immediately below the banner, show a table of products paginated with 5 per page, sorted by days until stockout (most urgent first) with columns: thumbnail, product name, current stock, units sold (last 30 days), days until stockout, recommended order quantity, demand trend, and switch to flag for reorder
- Calculate units sold from orders in the last 30 days, derive daily sales rate, calculate days until stockout (current inventory ÷ daily sales rate), and recommend 30 days of inventory
- In the days until stockout column, show red badge for <7 days, yellow badge for 7-14 days, plain number for >14 days
- In the demand trend column, show green badge ('Increasing') when 7-day avg > 30-day avg by >15%, red badge ('Decreasing') when lower by >15%, gray badge ('Stable') otherwise
- Display pagination controls under the table
- 'Export for Suppliers' downloads a CSV with Product Name, SKU, Current Stock, Days Until Stockout, Recommended Order Quantity, Sales Trend
- 'Tag Flagged Products' adds the 'Reorder' tag to selected products and updates the flagged count in the banner
The more specific your description, the better the output. Sidekick works best when you describe the layout, the data you need, and the actions it should support. Think of it as writing a product brief in plain language.
Automation
Prompt: Create a workflow to email me when inventory for any variant drops below 5 for the first time.
In practice: A digital operations team used Sidekick to build an automation that checks whether an order is placed for zero dollars, helping them flag potential discount abuse in real time instead of catching it in post-hoc reporting.
Specialized tools
Prompt: Create a returns and cancellation eligibility checker app for customer service agents.
- Query the shop's return policy on load and parse it to extract the return window in days
- If a return policy exists, show a small info banner with text 'Return window: X days'
- If no return policy exists, show a number field labeled 'Return window (days)' defaulting to 30 days for manual entry
- Show a search field with placeholder 'Search by order number (#1001, #1002, etc.)'
- As you type, show matching orders as a dropdown with order number, customer name, date, total, and 'View' button
- When 'View' is clicked, display order details in a card below the search
- At top of card, show order number as heading with two status badges: 'Return Eligible' (success) or 'Return Not Eligible' (critical), and 'Can Cancel' (success) or 'Cannot Cancel — Already Shipped' (neutral)
- Below badges, show sections with dividers: Order Status, Customer, Shipping Address, and Products with line items as cards showing thumbnail, product name, quantity, and price
- Action buttons: primary 'Process Return' (only enabled if eligible) and secondary 'Cancel Order' with critical tone (only enabled if can cancel)
- Calculate return eligibility by comparing order date to current date against the return window
In practice: The same digital operations team built a custom app with Sidekick that tracks how close they are to the 20 million maximum discount code limit—a real operational constraint that no off-the-shelf solution monitors, but one that could silently break promotions if missed.
Creation: Optimize and test without bottlenecking your creative team
Many enterprise teams already have dedicated creative resources and strict brand guidelines. Sidekick isn't here to replace that expertise—it's built to handle the optimization, testing, and operational content tasks that otherwise bottleneck your team.
SEO optimization
Prompt: Optimize my top-selling product for SEO while keeping the tone-of-voice in line with my brand.
Sidekick helps ensure product catalogs are optimized for both traditional search and AI discovery without requiring SEO specialists to manually review every product page.
Data-driven content optimization
Prompt: Identify products with high return rates and common reasons. Draft product page copy updates or warnings to address those reasons and provide links to edit.
Turn CX data into content fixes. Instead of waiting for a quarterly returns review, surface the specific products driving returns and generate the copy changes to address root causes—sizing guidance, material details, expectation-setting—directly on the product page.
Homepage and merchandising
Prompt: Propose a 'New Arrivals' homepage section with space for three new products with options for badges that say 'New' and 'Back in stock.' Provide copy and settings to configure in my theme.
A/B test variants
Prompt: Write five ad copy variants for my top selling products targeting [audience], each with one clear value prop and one proof point. Provide 30, 90, and 125-character versions and propose UTM slugs.
Generate test variants to feed your experimentation pipeline, maintaining brand voice at the volume needed for proper testing.
Storefront editing
Prompt: Create a full-width banner section visible only to customers who are not logged in, announcing 10% off to new customers.
Conditional visibility, layout, copy, and styling—described in one sentence, built and applied without touching code. Non-technical team members ship storefront updates in minutes instead of waiting on dev cycles.
Intelligence: Insights that surface before you ask
The previous sections focus on Sidekick responding to your questions. Pulse is different: it surfaces recommendations you didn't know to look for.
Instead of waiting for the right prompt, Sidekick Pulse proactively scans your store and surfaces opportunities buried in your data.
How Pulse works
Sidekick continuously runs deep research loops across your store—analyzing orders, traffic, returns, and seasonality, and making connections between them. It uses multiple AI models to explore signals, draft explanations, and suggest actions, then prioritizes the most valuable findings and surfaces high-value, data-cited recommendations.
When you're ready to act, Sidekick already has the context. Click into any insight; it walks you through the specific steps to address it, turning intelligence into execution.
Real Pulse examples
- Prioritize [size] restocks to capture missed revenue: Over the last 90 days, [product-color] in [size] sold 2,200 units but has only 300 in stock, [product-color] in [size] sold 3,000 units and is out of stock, and [product-color] in [size] sold 3,500 units and is also out of stock.
- Convert social sessions into revenue with shoppable content: Over the last 90 days, social media drove 8,987,467 sessions—35% of total traffic—but generated only $14,547,651 in attributed revenue, just 16% of sales. That's a 2.9% conversion rate compared to 10% from search traffic.
- Improve mobile cart-to-checkout rate to capture more of your largest traffic source: Mobile represents 47% of traffic (21,000,000 sessions), but only 4.8% of mobile carts reach checkout compared to 9% on desktop. Since mobile converts better overall, strengthening this cart-to-checkout step could meaningfully increase orders.
Where the most successful enterprise adopters start
The teams getting the most from Sidekick don't try to transform everything at once. They start with one use case where the same questions come up every week: a weekly performance review, a recurring inventory check, a pre-board data pull. They save the prompts that deliver value as Skills—reusable workflows that can be shared across departments—so the team doesn't start from scratch each time.
From there, adoption grows naturally. Sidekick can turn a complex analysis into a conversation. It can take an automation stuck in a backlog and make it something anyone can describe and build. It can give any team the ability to scope and build an operational tool on their own.
Sidekick comes standard in all Shopify plans. The question isn't whether AI can help your business. It's where to start.
