Shopify launched a beta version of an AI-powered assistant for its help center, the webpage where merchants can go to get answers to questions about running their business. The tool appears to handle some tasks that Shopify's customer-support staff have traditionally handled.
The help-center assistant chatbot can provide answers to questions about getting started on Shopify, managing inventory, setting up Shopify Payments, and other topics. It pulls from resources available in the help center in order to provide answers, and it directs users to directly contact Shopify's support staff if the issue is not adequately addressed.
The beta launch follows CEO Tobi Lütke's July 12 announcement of Sidekick, an AI assistant built into the Shopify admin, which also handles some tasks typically assigned to support agents.
An internal presentation given by Shopify leadership earlier this month indicated that the company plans to continue to lean on AI for support tasks as part of an ongoing transformation plan it calls "Code Yellow." Shopify executives declared a "Code Yellow" in March, saying that the team needed to improve customer-service levels "that have deteriorated beyond acceptable ranges." The Support org is now entering the second phase of that plan after seeing strong results in the first phase, according to the presentation.
A Shopify spokesperson did not immediately return Insider's request for comment.
In June, Shopify began asking some support staff to test a translation bot powered by OpenAI's technology. Its support staff already had the ability to use AI-generated template email responses to merchant inquiries. The tool scans existing documents and articles to generate answers to merchants' questions.
Shopify has been testing new ways of using AI in other areas of its business as well. In March, the company launched a ChatGPT-powered shopping plugin for its Shop app. The bot can recommend products sold by Shopify merchants based on shoppers' answers to a series of questions. It also recently launched a tool called Shopify Magic, which uses generative AI to write product descriptions.
"We believe that we are in the early innings of unlocking the true power of AI, not only for our merchants and their customers but also for Shopify," Harley Finkelstein, Shopify's president, said during its first-quarter earnings call in May.
In his note about the company's layoffs in May, in which 20% of its workforce was let go, Lütke wrote that the tech industry is now "at the dawn of the AI era."
"Shopify has the privilege of being amongst the companies with the best chances of using AI to help our customers," he wrote.
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