No Priors Ep. 49 | With Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates

Building an ecommerce business is hard – it requires merchants to have a wealth of skills: technical, logistics, marketing, pricing, vendor management, finance and analytics. That’s why Shopify is releasing new AI features that help merchants tackle things like product descriptions, marketing suggestions and search. Today on No Priors, Glen Coates, the VP of core product at Shopify (and former founder of b2b wholesale platform Handshake), joins Sarah and Elad. They talk about the releases from Shopify Editions, why they are deploying “copilot” rather than “autopilot,” AI innovation-at-scale, how to change the basement of a house while people are living in it, and building a leadership team of entrepreneurs. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @glencoates 0:00 Background 2:22 Calling a “Code Red” at Shopify 4:04 Integrating acquisitions, entrepreneurial leaders 12:15 AI adoption 15:51 Deciding when to ship AI products, evaluations 17:33 Shopify’s risk orientation 18:50 Changing the core Shopify data model, enabling AI features 26:05 What’s missing from LLMs for merchants 28:47 Most interesting AI developments in the industry 33:22 What users want from LLMs and search 38:20 No Priors social

Sarah GuohostGlen CoatesguestElad Gilhost

Jan 30, 202438mWatch on YouTube ↗

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Shopify VP Glen Coates on AI Copilots, Commerce Data, and Scale

Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates discusses how Shopify integrates founders and acquired products while reorganizing its structure to reduce duplicated systems and accelerate execution. He explains how AI is being embedded across Shopify—through products like Sidekick and Shopify Magic—to lower the barrier to entrepreneurship by acting as a copilot rather than fully autonomous agent. Coates dives into nerdy but crucial foundations like revamping Shopify’s product data model, AI-powered product taxonomy, semantic search, and AI-driven image editing to make small merchants perform like large retailers. He also reflects on the broader AI ecosystem, including agent interfaces (e.g., Rabbit), LLM-native search, and the tension between factual answers and opinionated recommendations.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Use founders as decisive product leaders, not just absorbed executives.

Shopify intentionally puts former founders into key product roles, leaning into their strong opinions and willingness to ‘own the buck’ to avoid design-by-committee stagnation and keep the company product-first.

Aggressively identify and collapse duplicate systems at the same stack layer.

Coates describes how seemingly small side projects (like order editing or invoicing) can unintentionally recreate core engines (like checkout), forcing every team and customer to pay the complexity tax until leadership ‘eats the vegetables’ and consolidates them.

Anchor AI strategy in mission: remove friction so more people can start businesses.

Shopify uses AI not as a gimmick but as a way to help non-experts—like someone struggling to write product descriptions or structure a catalog—get over the activation energy needed to launch and run a store.

Keep humans in the loop to manage risk while learning fast.

All current Shopify Magic features can propose but not commit changes; merchants must click save or send, generating rich feedback signals (accepted, edited, rejected) that improve models without risking merchants’ businesses.

Invest in boring-but-critical foundations like data models and taxonomy.

Shopify is overhauling its core product data model to support many more variants and embedding a standard taxonomy with AI-driven category and attribute detection, which materially improves on-site search, external channel performance, and merchant revenue.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

You can get an LLM agent to 75% in 10 minutes, and then it's this brutal hill climb to get it to 95%.

— Glen Coates

AI is probably one of the most powerful opportunities for more people who would otherwise be daunted by having to learn the switches.

— Glen Coates

We like taking risks that are risks to us. We don't like taking risks that could break someone's business.

— Glen Coates

Sometimes you actually don't notice that two things are in fact at the same layer of the stack until much later on.

— Glen Coates

It's like trying to take the foundations of a house and rearrange them while the house is still on top.

— Glen Coates

Founder-to-executive journey and acquisition integration at ShopifyCode red culture and organizational restructuring to fix systemic product issuesPrinciples for integrating overlapping product stacks and avoiding duplicated infrastructureShopify’s AI strategy: Sidekick, Shopify Magic, and human-in-the-loop designRevamping Shopify’s core product data model and taxonomy using AIAI-powered features: image editing, semantic search, and attribute inferenceBroader AI landscape: agents vs APIs, LLM-native search, and user intent in search

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