Inside Shopify's AI suite: Sidekick, SimGym and Agentic Storefronts, and what they mean for fashion brands

Shopify isn't dipping a toe into AI, it's building the platform around it. Sidekick is now a co-worker inside the admin, SimGym lets you stress-test a storefront on simulated shoppers before launch, Agentic Storefronts puts your catalogue inside ChatGPT and Copilot, and Shopify Magic powers a constant stream of creative quick-wins. The brands that understand how to use these tools, and which ones to take seriously today versus park for later, are already pulling ahead.

Here's our read on what's worth using right now, how each tool actually works, and how we're putting them to work for our clients.

Sidekick: the AI co-worker inside the admin

Sidekick is Shopify's native AI assistant, and it's matured into something closer to a junior team member than a help bot. It plans, executes multi-step tasks, generates content, builds Shopify Flow automations from a sentence, and remembers your preferences across sessions.

Three capabilities matter most for fashion brands:

• Sidekick Pulse runs in the background and surfaces up to five tailored recommendations per merchant — flagging things like a sudden drop-off on a hero product, a discount code under-performing, or a new geography starting to convert. Each card cites the data behind it so you can act with confidence.
• Reporting and customer insights on demand is one of the most useful features for daily operations. Ask Sidekick a question in plain English — "which products are returned the most in the last 90 days?" or "show me everyone who bought twice" — and it pulls the data, builds the segment, and shows the answer in seconds. The kind of weekly analysis that used to take half a morning now happens in a few clicks.
• Skills turn repeated prompts into reusable shortcuts. A weekly review, a post-launch checklist, a seasonal SEO pass — all encoded once, run on demand.

How we use Sidekick

For the brands we work with, Sidekick is most useful as a layer that compresses the admin work — pulling reports, drafting product copy, generating segments, and answering data questions without waiting on a manual analysis. Our E-commerce team uses it as a daily tool, not a novelty: it doesn't replace strategy or design, but it speeds up the operational work around them so the team can spend more time on the decisions that actually move the needle. For the deeper work — growth strategy, attribution, cohort analysis, full-funnel reporting — our Growth team and data analysts step in. Sidekick is excellent at quick answers within Shopify; the bigger questions need a holistic view across all sales channels, not just one.

SimGym: testing storefronts on AI shoppers before real ones see them

SimGym is the most distinctive thing in Shopify's current AI suite. It's a Shopify-built app, currently in AI Research Preview, that runs hundreds of AI shoppers through your store inside cloud browsers. Each agent has a persona, a budget, and an intent — they navigate, click, scroll, add to cart, abandon, and leave qualitative feedback ("I left because I couldn't find the return policy").

The personas are trained on behavioural data from billions of real Shopify transactions, then tuned to your store specifically. The current use case is theme comparison: you pit your live theme against a draft, and SimGym reports which one converts better with simulated traffic, where shoppers got stuck, and what to fix.

Why this matters for fashion brands:

• Traditional A/B testing needs volume. A store doing 20–50k monthly sessions can wait weeks for statistical significance — or worse, never reach it. SimGym gives you directional signal in 10–15 minutes.
• Pre-launch validation before Black Friday, a major drop, or a redesign goes from "deploy and pray" to "stress-test, then deploy".
• It surfaces the unsexy issues — broken navigation, confusing collection logic, a CTA that gets bypassed — that usually only get caught after a redesign tanks conversion.

How we use SimGym

SimGym is now part of our discovery process before a new theme or major redesign goes live. We compare the new direction against the existing live theme, use the qualitative feedback to refine the build, and only then put it in front of real customers. Think of it the way a pilot uses a flight simulator: catch the obvious problems first, then validate the rest with real users post-launch. It's an early signal, not a verdict — but it saves a lot of expensive late-stage discoveries.

Agentic Storefronts: when AI becomes the new search

Customers are increasingly starting their product search inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, or Google's AI Mode. Agentic Storefronts is Shopify's answer: a single sales channel inside the admin that syndicates your catalogue across every major AI surface — no separate integrations, no per-platform feeds, no transaction fees beyond standard processing.

For Shopify merchants selling to US buyers, ChatGPT discovery is on by default. Buyers find your products inside the conversation, then complete checkout on your own store via an in-app browser. You stay the merchant of record, you keep the customer relationship, and orders flow into the admin with proper referrer attribution. Copilot, Google AI Mode, and Gemini work similarly, with direct in-chat checkout available where supported.

How we use Agentic Storefronts

This is the most strategically important shift in the suite for any brand we work with. Discovery is moving away from search pages and into conversations, and the brands that structure their product data well — clean attributes, accurate inventory, proper categorisation, complete policies — will be the ones AI agents recommend. The ones that don't, won't show up. We're prioritising this groundwork in our retainers because it compounds: every AI channel that comes after will read from the same foundation, so the work pays off across surfaces we haven't even seen yet.

Shopify Magic: the layer underneath

Shopify Magic is the underlying AI suite that powers many of these features — image generation and editing, content drafts, theme blocks, email copy. It now lives mostly inside Sidekick rather than as a separate product, but it's worth naming because most of the creative quick-wins — background swaps on product imagery, expanding canvas, drafting email subject lines, generating section blocks for any Theme Store theme — flow through Magic.

For fashion specifically, the studio-quality image editing is where it earns its keep. It won't replace a campaign shoot, but it makes B-roll, secondary product shots, and lifestyle backgrounds significantly faster to produce.

How we use Shopify Magic

Shopify Magic complements our creative team's work, it doesn't replace it. We use it to extend campaign assets, refresh product page imagery between shoots, and accelerate the volume of tested creative going into ads. The campaign vision still comes from the creative team — Magic just helps us execute around it faster and at higher volume.

The takeaway

Shopify's AI suite isn't a feature drop, it's a direction. The platform is being built on the assumption that every store runs with AI inside the loop — for discovery, for testing, for operations, for content. The brands that adopt these tools thoughtfully will move faster and waste less. The ones that wait will compete with brands whose conversion rate, content velocity, and AI-channel visibility have already pulled ahead.

AI on Shopify isn't going to replace good strategy or strong creative. But it will keep raising the floor of what's expected. The work now is to make sure your brand is set up to take advantage of it — clean data, sharp creative, confident testing, and a partner who knows where to push first.

Let us help you get the most out of Shopify's AI

At Not selling liquid, we sit close to the platform — we're a Shopify Premier Partner and one of the few agencies in Europe at that tier. That means we see what's coming before it ships, we know where it works and where it doesn't yet, and we apply it to fashion brands every day.

If you want to understand what Sidekick, SimGym, and Agentic Storefronts could do for your store specifically — whether that's tightening operations, validating a redesign, or making sure your products show up in the next generation of AI-powered discovery — get in touch.