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 31, 202438mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: January 31, 2024
Duration: 38m
Channel: No Priors
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

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

SPEAKERS

Sarah Guo
host
Glen Coates
guest
Elad Gil
host

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of No Priors, featuring Sarah Guo and Glen Coates, No Priors Ep. 49 | With Shopify VP of Core Product Glen Coates explores 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.

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