Practical AI – Episode #299
Sidekick is an AI Shopify expert
with Mike Tamir & Matt Colyer from Shopify
Today, Chris explores Shopify Magic and other AI offerings with Mike Tamir, Distinguished ML Engineer and Head of Machine Learning, and Matt Colyer, Director of Product Management for Sidekick. They talk about how Shopify uses generative AI and LLMs to enhance their products, and they take a deeper dive into Sidekick, a first-of-its-kind, AI-enabled commerce assistant that understands a merchant’s business (products, orders, customers) and has been trained to know all about Shopify.
Featuring
Sponsors
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Timescale – Purpose-built performance for AI Build RAG, search, and AI agents on the cloud and with PostgreSQL and purpose-built extensions for AI: pgvector, pgvectorscale, and pgai.
Eight Sleep – Up to $600 off Pod 4 Ultra — Go to eightsleep.com/changelog and use the code CHANGELOG. You can try it for free for 30 days - but we’re confident you will not want to return it (we love ours). Once you experience AI-optimized sleep, you’ll wonder how you ever slept without it. Currently shipping to: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.
Notes & Links
Chapters
| Chapter Number | Chapter Start Time | Chapter Title | Chapter Duration |
| 1 | 00:00 | Welcome to Practical AI | 00:34 |
| 2 | 00:35 | Sponsor: Fly | 02:29 |
| 3 | 03:16 | What is Shopify? | 01:54 |
| 4 | 05:10 | What sets Shopify apart? | 00:59 |
| 5 | 06:09 | Wide array of customers | 01:52 |
| 6 | 08:01 | The Ai turning point | 01:11 |
| 7 | 09:12 | Shopify's mission | 01:22 |
| 8 | 10:33 | Approaching different models | 01:10 |
| 9 | 11:43 | Strengths and weaknesses of different perspectives | 03:08 |
| 10 | 14:51 | Growing pains | 02:19 |
| 11 | 17:21 | Sponsor: Timescale | 02:21 |
| 12 | 19:58 | Find your way out of the forest | 03:31 |
| 13 | 23:29 | Other products | 03:48 |
| 14 | 27:17 | Plugging in the ecosystem | 03:14 |
| 15 | 30:45 | Sponsor: Eight Sleep | 02:34 |
| 16 | 33:29 | What is Magic? | 00:41 |
| 17 | 34:10 | Adding more AI capabilities? | 06:00 |
| 18 | 40:10 | Finding utility in other tools | 04:07 |
| 19 | 44:17 | Looking to the future | 06:07 |
| 20 | 50:23 | Thanks for joining us! | 00:27 |
| 21 | 50:50 | Outro | 00:46 |