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