Shopify President Says AI Shopping Agents Will Open E-Commerce to 82 Percent of Retail Still Offline
Harley Finkelstein told investors that agentic personal shoppers represent a fundamentally merit-based discovery channel that will surface smaller brands to consumers far more effectively than traditional search.
Shopify president Harley Finkelstein said at the Upfront Summit in Los Angeles on Monday that the company is going all-in on agentic shopping as a transformative force for e-commerce, arguing that AI agents will unlock a vast swath of retail that has never moved online. Finkelstein pointed out that only about 18 percent of U.S. retail purchases are currently made via e-commerce, and framed agentic AI as a new front door for merchants that could meaningfully close that gap.
The core argument Finkelstein made is that AI agents fundamentally change how products get discovered by consumers. Unlike search engines, which surface results based on advertising spend and keyword optimization, an AI agent that knows a shopper's preferences and history can act as a commission-free personal shopper — recommending products based on genuine fit rather than commercial priority.
He used the example of a consumer who prefers On running shoes: a traditional search engine query for athletic shoes returns major retailer results, while an agentic shopper familiar with the person's tastes would surface On's products directly.
For the millions of smaller merchants on Shopify who struggle with product discoverability, Finkelstein said agentic AI represents a significant opportunity to reach customers who would otherwise never encounter their products through conventional channels. He acknowledged that the initial rollout will be gradual and that the full potential of agentic commerce will take time to materialize, but characterized the shift as structural and inevitable rather than incremental.
Finkelstein's remarks land at a moment when Shopify is navigating the broader industry debate over how AI agents should handle the transaction step — discovery, recommendation, and checkout — particularly after OpenAI's Instant Checkout feature fell well short of its initial ambitions. Shopify confirmed the same week that it is upgrading its ChatGPT shopping integration under a revised model that gives merchants more control over the customer experience and transaction data.
Read the original reporting at TechCrunch.
